The Groovy development team is really pleased and proud to announce the release of the final version of Groovy 1.8.0!

After a lot of work and efforts throughout four betas and four release candidates, version 1.8 of Groovy has been long in the making, but is packed with tons of new features and enhancements, for your productivity, and your pleasure. In particular, you'll be happy to learn about:

• the new Domain-Specific Language authoring capabilities for more readability and expressivity of your business rules, 
• the runtime performance improvements, 
• the bundling of the GPars parallel and concurrency library,
• the built-in JSON support, 
• the new compile-time meta-programming features (several new useful AST transformations), 
• the new functional programming aspects of closures, 
• and much more.

To get all the details, with code samples, we have prepared an in-depth release notes document. Please have a look at it to learn more about the features listed above, and discover other smaller enhancements as well.

You can download Groovy 1.8 in our download section and you can have a look at the list of JIRA tickets that have found their way into this major release.

We'd like to thank all those who participated and contributed to this release: users, contributors, committers, framework writers, IDE developers, book authors. Without you all, Groovy wouldn't be the great productive language it is now. And again, without you all, Groovy wouldn't be surrounded by its vibrant, active and rich ecosystem, giving you advanced tools and frameworks for building web applications (Grails, Gaelyk) or rich desktop applications (Griffon), for building your own projects (Gradle), for testing your projects (Spock, Geb), for tackling the concurrency and parallel problems on our multi-core / multi-processor architectures (GPars), or for improving the quality of your Groovy code bases (CodeNarc for static code analysis, GContracts for design by contract).

Enjoy this release!