Just a quick feedback for GEP-28: I saw that "Sigil variants" (@RED,
:RED, etc) are already stated as rejected in the GEP, but what about
something similar to Groovy's "it" in closures (maybe as an option, to
also be able to break ambiguities without having to fall back to the
current fully qualified notation) ?
To me the floating-in-free-air-dot-prefix notation ( .RED ) looks like
an error / ugly...
Cheers,
mg
Am 28.07.2026 um 08:30 schrieb Paul King:
Hi folks,
I created two more draft GEPs tentatively targeting Groovy 7:
* GEP-28 is about supporting DOT-notation that is supported by Dart and Swift.
[I like the brevity it gives but it also takes some getting used to
and it complicates things if Java ever develops a different compact
syntax.]
* GEP-29 is about supporting deeper null checking.
[This is really about whether we want to fully support JSpecify which
seems to be gaining momentum. NullChecker in Groovy 6 already offers
partial support.]
I don't really have the cycles to do major reviews of the GEPs yet,
and I expect both will go through several iterations when we do. For
both we should ask ourselves whether we need the feature and weigh up
each's value against the increased complexity. But I wanted to capture
the ideas anyway, since I think they are worth thinking about in due
course. We should be comfortable with rejecting GEPs if the ideas
don't belong or belong somewhere else.
To be honest, we already have a backlog of potential Groovy 7 features
that will keep us busy for a while.
But if other folks want to jump ahead and think about them, feel free.
Cheers, Paul.
