What's the difference between Groovy 1.8.2 and Groovy 1.9-beta-3?

What functionality and/or bug fixes does Groovy 1.9-beta-3 have that Groovy 1.8.2 doesn't have?

The release notes for Groovy 1.9-beta-3 ( http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10242&version=17495 ) and Groovy 1.8.2 ( http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10242&version=17494 ) look EXACTLY the same.

The only way 1.9-beta-3 looks different to 1.8.2 are these syntax additions introduced in beta-1:

• underscores in number literals: 1_000_000_000
• binary literals: 0b01010101
• catch multiple exceptions at once with multicatch: catch (IOException | NullPointerException e)开发者_StackOverflow社区

I can't find any other differences in any release notes or announcements. Am I overlooking something important or are these version lines intended to be roughly the same?

Just tried a diff between the 1_8_X branch and the master branch, and apart from some tests getting cleaned up, some additional stuff going in to the AST handlers and some work on the build system around stub generation, that does seem to be the current differences between the two branches.

I assume at some point the groovy-antlr3 branch (when it is completed) will go into whatever version of Groovy is in beta at the time, and as 1.8.X draws towards EOL, all the new stuff will go into 1.9.X

This question is probably going to get a much more complete and believable response if you ask it on the developer mailing list however, as that will then be seen by the core development group of Groovy (who will know these things like the back of their hand)