Is there any way to speed up the startup time of Groovy? (Except using the some kind of separate running Groovy process, as has been suggested).

I don't care much about execution times, but the slow startup is making it impossible to develop in Groovy for me.

A simple comparison between starting and running an empty script, using Groovy and Ruby on my machine:

```
$ time groovy -e ""
real   0m5.678s
user   0m6.468s
sys    0m0.456s

$ time ruby -e ""
real   0m0.023s
user   0m0.020s
sys    0m0.004s

```

I am running Ubuntu 11.10 using the standard packages in the repositories.

```
$ groovy -v
Groovy Version: 1.7.10 JVM: 1.6.0_23

$ cat /etc/lsb-release 
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=11.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=oneiric
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 11.10"

$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_23"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.11pre) (6b23~pre11-0ubuntu1.11.10.1)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.0-b11, mixed mode)

```