I used Java for like 6-7 years, then some months ago I discovered Groovy and started to save a lot of typing.. then I wondered how certain things worked under the hood (because groovy performance is really poor) and understood that to give you dynamic typing every Groovy object is a MetaClass object that handles all the things that the JVM couldn't handle by itself. Of course this introduces a layer in the middle between what you write and what you execute that slows down everything.

Then somedays ago I started getting some infos about Scala. How these two languages compare in their byte code translations? How much things they add to the normal structure that it would be obtained by plain Java code?

I mean, Scala is static typed so wrapper of Java classes should be lighter, since many things are checked during compile time but I'm not sure about the real differences of what's going inside. (I'm not talking about the functional aspect of Scala compared to the other ones, that's a different thing)

Can someone enlighten me?

From WizardOfOdds it seems like that the only way to get less typing and same performance would be to write an intermediate translator that translates something in Java code (letting javac compile it) without alterating how things are executed, just adding synctatic sugar withour caring about other fallbacks of the language itself.