Groovy has both a dynamic nature (supporting code styles similar to Ruby and Python) as well as a static nature (supporting styles similar to Java, Kotlin and Scala). Groovy continues to improve both those natures - filling in any feature gaps. As just one example, Groovy has numerous facilities for better managing null values. You can use Groovy’s null-safe navigation operator, piggy back on Java’s Optional or provide a null-checking extension to the type checker. These are augmented in Groovy 3 with null-safe indexing for arrays, lists and maps and a new AST transformation @NullCheck for automatically instrumenting code with null checks.
In general, the language design borrows heavily from Java, so careful attention is paid to changes in Java and acted on accordingly if appropriate. A lot of work has been done getting Groovy ready for Java modules and for making it work well with JDK versions 9-15. Other work has dramatically improved the performance of bytecode generation which makes use of the JVMs invoke dynamic capabilities. Additional changes are already underway for further improvements in these areas in Groovy 4.
There are also many other performance improvements under the covers. More efficient type resolution occurs during compilation and more efficient bytecode is generated for numerous scenarios. The addition of a Maven BOM allows more flexible usage of Groovy from other projects.
Groovy also has particular strengths for scripting, testing, writing Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) and in domains like financial calculations and data science. On-going work has been made to ensure those strengths are maintained. The accuracy used for high-precision numbers has been improved and is configurable. Much of the tooling such as Groovy Console and groovysh have also been improved.
Other key strengths of Groovy such as its runtime and compile-time meta-programming capabilities have also seen many minor enhancements. All in all, this release represents the culmination of several years of activity. Over 500 new features, improvements and bug fixes have been added since Groovy 2.5. Just a few highlights are discussed below.