Groovy is slow!

I have been trying to write a prototype for my thesis work in groovy, but I was thinking it seemed a bit slow. Sure, this is to be expected for such a dynamic language, and interpreted at that. But when I wrote a few microbenchmarks I noticed that interpretation didnt seem to be the culprit here.

First, I tried adding things to a hashmap. This did not reveal any big difference between java and groovy though, the difference were about 100% which I find acceptable, so I continued my search on towards creating objects, and here groovy seems to be adding some substantial overhead:

        val = new Integer("0") 
        for(i in 0..<1000000){
            Integer tmp2 = new Integer(43)
            val += tmp2
        }

versus:

        val = new Integer("0") 
        Integer tmp2 = new Integer(43)
        for(i in 0..<1000000){
            val += tmp2
        }

Java: 387ms, 206ms, Groovy: 29873ms, 4527ms respectively. Firstly, even when not creating Integers in the loop, groovy is still much much slower, but adding the object creation just makes it intolerably slow! This was precompiled with groovyc then run with the -server parameter to gain some speed.


I am reading in and parsing the database of Wordnet, and that alone takes some 400 seconds in the current version of my code, which I find a bit too much to sit around and wait for each time I restart my app! Yes, there are ways around this, and I will use them eventually (such as only reloading changed code and not restart the entire JVM, keeping the intialized structures in RAM and ready).