That's a good idea! And it'll be familiar to developers coming from those other languages as well.
On Sun, Apr 12, 2026 at 2:00 PM Paul King <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi folks, > > We have been asked numerous times about the possibility of having a "val" > keyword to match Kotlin and Scala. We also have had a related Jira open for > more than 6 years. So I created a GEP to help frame a discussion about what > would be involved and help us make a decision: > > https://groovy.apache.org/wiki/GEP-16.html > > I know we have "final", but many developers I speak to from the Kotlin and > Scala worlds are big fans of "val" and believe it was the right name to use > for those two languages. > > Given that it involves changes to only about 15 lines of production Groovy > code and has well-identified impacts (arguably edge cases with > workarounds), I am largely in favor of this proposal, but I am keen to hear > other's thoughts. > > Cheers, Paul. > > > -- *Guillaume Laforge* Apache Groovy committer Developer Advocate @ Google Cloud <https://cloud.google.com/> - Blog: glaforge.dev - X: @glaforge <http://twitter.com/glaforge> - Bluesky: @glaforge.dev <https://bsky.app/profile/glaforge.dev> - Mastodon: @[email protected] <http://%[email protected]/>
