Google has just unveiled in their I/O 2017 conference that Android will officially support Kotlin programming language and got huge applause from the IT world. It is an open source project under Apache 2.0 license and built by JetBrains who earlier built IntelliJ. Google has announced that Kotlin is brilliantly designed, mature and will take android development to the next level as it is fast and fully supported by Java. Using Kotlin in Android development will be more fun.
For Android developers, Kotlin as a “first-class” language, is a chance to use a modern, powerful and mature language. It will help to solve the run-time exceptions and source code verbosity. Kotlin provides the flexibility which means it can be easily introduced into an existing project. Kotlin emits the java bytecode and can call java and vice versa out of the box. “The effortless inter-operation between the two languages” was a large part of Kotlin’s appeal to the Android team.
Developers can play around the Kotlin using Android Studio 3.0 and there is no need to install any extra plugin or worry about the compatibility issue. You can open the existing Java file, and then choose the option “Convert Java File to Kotlin File”. Android Studio will then add all required Kotlin dependencies into your project and the equivalent Kotlin code. Isn’t this cool?
Kotlin’s major goal is to be available on multiple platforms. Also, they are pretty much busy on working on native platforms like iOS, IoT, macOS, embedded systems.
As said by Google, some of the apps have already started using Kotlin like Expedia, Flipboard, Pinterest, Square. They are getting very positive feedback.
Kotlin has a lot in common to Java in structure as it’s object oriented and statically typed. It is designed for the problem that actually Java solves.
Some of the cool features of Kotlin
- Nullability is a very common problem in Java. Basically having null references in the application can kill it. Kotlin finds the difference between the reference that can hold the null or that can’t, effortlessly.
- Switching from Java is easy as there is an option to convert Java files in Kotlin directly from the plugin in Android Studio.
- Kotlin is versatile and interoperable with Java as developers can write their own module that will work with Java code. It’s compatible with the existing Java library.
- Kotlin’s architecture is written in such a way that one has to write less code; at least 20% less while development, which is fascinating.
- A common problem in Android development that causes inefficiency to Java code is extra garbage collection. So Kotlin does a fabulous job to avoid this problem.
- The Lean syntax in Kotlin language is very convenient. Kotlin balances terseness and readability in syntax which helps to write the code faster and allows better productivity.
- Kotlin also provides Functional programming support with zero-overhead Lambdas.
- It imposes no runtime overhead.
- Kotlin’s extension functions are helpful in building really clean APIs and solve a bunch of other problems.
- The == operator does exactly what the community expects.
To learn more about Kotlin, check out their official website.
