title: Slow startup time
body: <p>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).</p>
  
  <p>I don't care much about execution times, but the slow startup is making it impossible to develop in Groovy for me.</p>
  
  <p>A simple comparison between starting and running an empty script, using Groovy and Ruby on my machine:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$ time groovy -e ""
  real   0m5.678s
  user   0m6.468s
  sys    0m0.456s
  
  $ time ruby -e ""
  real   0m0.023s
  user   0m0.020s
  sys    0m0.004s
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am running Ubuntu 11.10 using the standard packages in the repositories.</p>
  
  <pre><code>$ 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)
  </code></pre>