After announcing Kotlin as an official language for writing android apps at Google I/O 2017, this language has seen tremendous growth. Kotlin is a statically-typed general purpose programming language that runs on the JVM and comes with a lot of amazing features.
The Android Studio 3.0 brought full support for Kotlin. This language solved many common issues and make it easier for developers to create android apps while also improving the development cycle.
Read: 5 Key Features of Kotlin Programming For Android Development
Google Suggests Using Kotlin For Android App Development
Two years later, at Google I/O 2019, the search giant has announced Kotlin as one of the most-loved programming languages. Google also revealed that more than 50% of developers are using Kotlin to develop their apps.
According to a blog post written by Chet Haase, chief advocate for Google’s Android, “Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first. 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 which is written in Kotlin often means much less code for you – overall, less code to type, test, and maintain.”
If we look at Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019, Kotlin ranks as the fourth-most loved programming language. Also, the number of Kotlin contributors is rapidly growing on Github.
Considering all these factors, the Haase said, “We’re announcing that the next big step that we’re taking is that we’re going Kotlin-first.” Though Google is expanding the support of Kotlin, they also confirmed that developers can still use Java and C++ for Android development.
“We understand that not everybody is on Kotlin right now, but we believe that you should get there. 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,” Haase added.
Google describes Kotlin as a modern statically typed programming language that not only boosts your productivity but also brings happiness to developers.
If you don’t know, Kotlin was officially released in February 2016 by JetBrains. It runs on the top of JVM and can also be compiled to Java. You can use Kotlin alongside Java for building apps.
Kotlin doesn’t require you to write large amounts of ‘boilerplate’ code, and that’s the main advantage of this language. You need to type less code, test and maintain. It’s modern statically typed language fully interoperable with Java. It means you can easily call Java code from Kotlin and Kotlin code from Java.
