Google suggests using Kotlin programming language to build a new Android app
In May 2017, Google at I/O 2017 had announced Kotlin as an officially supported language in its Android Studio IDE that would make it easier for developers to create apps for Android, while also speeding up the development cycle.
Two years later, Google has announced Kotlin as one of the most-loved languages with over 50% of professional Android developers now using the language to develop their apps.
“Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first,” Chet Haase, chief advocate for Google’s Android wrote in a blog post. “Many new Jetpack APIs and features will be offered first in Kotlin. If you’re starting a new project, you should write it in Kotlin; code written in Kotlin often mean much less code for you–less code to type, test, and maintain.”
Kotlin not only ranks as the fourth-most loved programming language in the latest Stack Overflow developer survey, but it is also one of the fastest-growing languages on GitHub in the number of contributors.
As a result, Google has decided to expand its Kotlin support while still continuing to support the use of Java and C++ for Android development.
“We’re announcing that the next big step that we’re taking is that we’re going Kotlin-first,” Haase said.
“We understand that not everybody is on Kotlin right now, but we believe that you should get there,” Haase added. “There may be valid reasons for you to still be using the C++ and Java programming languages and that’s totally fine. These are not going away.”
Google describes Kotlin as “a modern statically typed programming language that will boost your productivity and increase your developer happiness.”
For those unaware, Kotlin was officially released in February 2016 by JetBrains. The language 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.
Like Java, Kotlin as a language is object-oriented and statically typed and fully interoperable with Java code. In Kotlin, there is less code to type, test, and maintain. It also doesn’t require developers to write large amounts of “boilerplate” code. It is modern and expressive and provides safer code. Also, Kotlin’s interoperability with Java makes it possible to call Kotlin code from Java or Java code from Kotlin.
Source: Google
