If you compare Groovy to Java in benchmarks, Groovy's is on average 8 times slower than Java in the specific benchmarks I've seen (which included sorting things and finding things), so based on those benchmarks, if I wanted to sort and find things, I wouldn't use it if that was my requirements. Other benchmarks show it to be close to Java performance.
The most important thing to note here is that Groovy is a dynamic language. This essentially means that most of the time Groovy compiler will have little to no knowledge about the type of an object it is calling a method on / retrieving a property from. This has a huge impact on the performance. There might be thousands of different classes implementing someFancyMethodName() not having a common base class.
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All that makes Groovy pretty slow. In fact much slower and, what is more painful, more memory consuming than most of the dynamic languages out there (Python for instance).
Groovy 2 seems to do a lot better than Groovy 1, but it's still slower nevertheless.
David suggests that it's possible to get equivalent performance to Java, but that it would require some extra work.
Groovy has many advantages over plain Java and for those already familiar with Java it is easy to progressively learn. The main benefits of Groovy come down to efficiency and convenience for developers, usually at the cost of runtime performance. With a bit of knowledge and effort that doesn't have to be the case. Groovy code can run as fast as Java code.
This begs the question: does the extra effort of optimizing Groovy code cancel out the development efficiency it offers? From my experience the answer is a clear no,
If you compare Kotlin to Java, the difference in performance is almost negligible since Kotlin generates code that's equivalent to Java code and considering that Kotlin makes everything final and variables can easily be made final using val instead of var, you might gain a little bit in that regard assuming the Java code doesn't put final in front of every function, parameter and variable.
Jan Vladimir Mostert
Idea Incubator
If you compare Groovy to Java in benchmarks, Groovy's is on average 8 times slower than Java in the specific benchmarks I've seen (which included sorting things and finding things), so based on those benchmarks, if I wanted to sort and find things, I wouldn't use it if that was my requirements. Other benchmarks show it to be close to Java performance.
Quote from StackOverflow:
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Groovy 2 seems to do a lot better than Groovy 1, but it's still slower nevertheless.
dzone.com/articles/groovy-20-performance-compared
David suggests that it's possible to get equivalent performance to Java, but that it would require some extra work.
If you compare Kotlin to Java, the difference in performance is almost negligible since Kotlin generates code that's equivalent to Java code and considering that Kotlin makes everything final and variables can easily be made final using
valinstead ofvar, you might gain a little bit in that regard assuming the Java code doesn't put final in front of every function, parameter and variable.