A Look at the Main JVM Languages Today, February 14, 2012 The JVM hosts an increasingly wide array of languages. Here we compare the prominent ones, mourn those that have come and gone, and celebrate newborn languages clamoring for attention.
Groovy was originally launched as a JSR. It floundered there for several years and the original leaders eventually went off to work on other projects. Not until French developer Guillaume Laforge took it over did Groovy really spring back to life full of energy and with a large enthusiastic community. It's the language that most closely resembles Java, as it was designed to implement a smorgasbord of syntactic sugars, which it has done successfully. It is today only one of two JVM languages with a paid development team working for a public company (VMware — Gosu is the other language). As a result, updates are frequent, and the most recent ones are addressing Groovy's greatest deficiency: very slow runtime.
Part of the execution performance solution the team is implementing was presented earlier in Dr. Dobb's