Groovy in Action, Second Edition

Appendix F. Compiler phases

This appendix describes the phases of the Groovy compiler.

Conway’s Law is a well-known maxim from the 1960s that states roughly that the organization of a software system will match the communication structure of the group creating the system. Or, as Eric Raymond’s more famous restatement^[1] puts it: “If you have four groups working on a compiler, you’ll get a 4-pass compiler.” Groovy’s compiler is a counterpoint to this law: one group maintains it yet it has nine phases. Something unique happens in each phase, and there are good reasons for each one’s existence. The nine phases, presented in the order in which they execute, are:

¹ Eric S. Raymond, The New Hacker’s Dictionary, 3rd Ed. (MIT Press, 1996).

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