Kotlin: This new programming language is compatible with Java, and now officially supported on Android
Google at the I/O 2017 Developers Conference the day before yesterday announced that Kotlin will be an officially supported language in Android. Kotlin will now join the list of existing programming languages used for Android app development, such as Java and C++.
“We did it because Kotlin is a beautiful programming language,” said Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson, director of product management for Android, during the developer keynote at Google I/O 2017. “…With Kotlin, there’s just so much less syntactical noise between what I want to say and how I can say it.”
Created by Czech developers JetBrains, who also created IntelliJ, hope that Kotlin will make it easier for developers to create apps for Android, while also speeding up the development cycle. Google was quick to add that Kotlin is not a replacement for Java or C++ support but only an additional language.
Officially released in February 2016 by JetBrains, Kotlin runs on the top of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and can also be compiled to Java source code and be used alongside Java to build apps. Android Studio 3.0Â will support Kotlin right out of the box, making it easy to get started with the new language.
Like Java, Kotlin as a language is object oriented and statically typed and fully interoperable with Java code. It is designed to solve similar problem that Java does. Further, Kotlin adds a lot of nice-to-have features that Java itself doesn’t currently support, a much cleaner syntax, improved code readability, ideas from functional programming, and other improvements over Java. Also, Kotlin’s interoperability with Java makes it possible to call Kotlin code from Java or Java code from Kotlin.
To know more about Kotlin, you can visit their website by clicking here.
