&gt; I remember there was some very very bitter Groovy evangelist a while ago<p>Apache Groovy has always been good for scripting stuff on the JVM, including for Grails and as a DSL for Gradle. Unfortunately, one of its backers tried to retrofit it to do static compilation, and pitched it as a alternative to Java instead of simply an accompaniment. That&#x27;s when the trouble started. Groovy&#x27;s static compilation can&#x27;t be as good as that of a language designed from the ground to be statically compiled, e.g. Java, Scala, or Kotlin. To this day, Groovy&#x27;s own codebase is still Java. Even though some people talk anonymously of &quot;1 million line Groovy codebase where static compilation is required&quot;, Groovy&#x27;s own &quot;million line codebase&quot; isn&#x27;t statically compiled Groovy and until it is, any claim of such codebases is just a claim, nothing more.