Groovy faster than Java ?

Just a few days ago I wrote a post saiyng that yes, maybe Groovy is not as fast as Java, but is most than suitable for a big class of applications. I also mentioned some attempts to increase Groovy performances, mainly Groovy++. Some days later a surprising article was published by Alex Tkachman, the lead developer of the Groovy++ project.

This article presents just the result of some rough performance tests run on Groovy++ and previously presented on the Groovy++ site. The test itself was a Groovy implementation of a simple file word counting algorithm implemented in many languages (among these Java, Scala, Clojure and Ruby).

The result was a big surprise: while the 'standard' Groovy version was about 5 times slower than the Java version, the Static Groovy version was (slightly) faster than Java. The concurrent version was of course even better.

So...what does this mean ?
Well..nothing.
This benchmark was just an homemade test, without any assumption to be meaningful or definitive. The Java cose was not optimized, unlike Groovy code, and the test was highly depending on I/O.
But what's worth to be noted is they are working on it, and it's starting to make sense to compare the performances of Groovy with the ones of some other mainstream languages.

Just a couple of months ago it seemed like Sci-Fi...