In an email by Jochen Theodorou on May 27, 2007 to the groovy-user list, titled Re: ClassLoader problem, he says: I see a --classpath option for GroovyStarter, which means it is added to the classpath GroovyStarter uses to generate a RootLoader. Which would not be needed, as the groovy-starter.conf contains a reference to groovy.jar as well. Since its redundant, and we may want to remove the groovy.jar from RootLoader altogether, let's eliminate this now.