This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Joe Walnes. Original Post: Running Groovy natively without the JVM Feed Title: Joe's New Jelly Feed URL: http://joe.truemesh.com/blog/index.rdf Feed Description: The musings of a ThoughtWorker obsessed with Agile, XP, maintainability, Java, .NET, Ruby and OpenSource. Mmm'kay? Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Joe Walnes Latest Posts From Joe's New Jelly

Two days ago I was hacking away at some Ruby scripts and thought it would be nice if I could write them in Groovy (not necessarily useful, just nice).

Of course, for small scripts that honour the UNIX philosophy, that would be a terrible idea. These scripts should start instantly and have minimal overheads.

What changes would be needed to allow Groovy to compete with languages like Perl, Python, TCL, Ruby or plain old shell scripts in this space?

• Better performance / reduced overheads (cpu, memory, start-up time).
• Simple install (src tarball, RPM, dpkg, windows installer, OS-X whatever).
• No JVM required.
• Ability to use Groovy to access less Javaish libraries (POSIXy style stuff, MFC, .NET).
• Ability to use Groovy (and Java) objects from other languages (C, C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, .NET, etc)

As an experiment, I've created a subproject of Groovy (groovy-native) that aims to address these issues.

Take a peek at where I'm going with this.

So far:

• Created a stripped down native runtime library (libgroovy.so).
• Compiled a .groovy file to a native executable (linked with libgroovy).
• Created a native C++ app that calls interops with Groovy objects.