If you really want to create an array rather than a list use either
String[] names = ["lucas", "Fred", "Mary"]
or
def names = ["lucas", "Fred", "Mary"].toArray()
@SafeVarargs
Is a cure for the warning: [unchecked] Possible heap pollution from parameterized vararg type Foo.
Is part of the method's contract, hence why the annotation has runtime retention.
Is a promise to the caller of the method that the method will not mess up the heap using the generic varargs argument.
R. Okuta, Y. Unno, D. Nishino, S. Hido, and C. Loomis. Proceedings of Workshop on Machine Learning Systems (LearningSys) in The Thirty-first Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), (2017)