Groovy advantages over Jython or Jruby?

Question

Why would I choose to use Groovy when I could use Jython or Jruby? Does the language provide any inherent advantages to make up for the fact that Jython and Jruby skills are app

Answer 1

I think Dick Wall gave a very good summary of the differences between these three on the Java Posse podcast (#213, about 34:20 in) ... "JRuby was designed to make programmers happy ... it's a programming language developer's choice; Python has very strong roots in simplicity and education; Groovy is aimed squarely at being the choice for Java developers ... it's a very familiar environment for Java ... with support for annotations".

In terms of moving the language outside of the JVM, I don't think the Java runtime imposes much of an overhead -- it's a simple install, and you need to set some environment variables -- but it does provide a number of benefits including a mature runtime which has been highly optimised, and a large set of libraries. The JRuby team are now reporting better performance than the native MRI. http://blog.headius.com/2008/08/twas-brillig.html