Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oracle v Google
Android has been using OpenJDK for a while with no problems.
Google vs Oracle isn't "no problems"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google....
Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
41–50 of 99 posts
Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#42I thought it was already Google's preferred language. I remember they announced that some time ago.
Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Android has been using OpenJDK for a while with no problems.
Google vs Oracle isn't "no problems" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google... .
As far as I can tell, Oracle vs Google was due to Google not using OpenJDK, but their own implementation.
Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#44...great, Kotlin for Android, Dart for Flutter, on the ML side they're starting to adopt Swift, for networking infra code Go. What the heck is with this "tower of babel"?! Are other people not bothered by the overlapping features of all these languages? At this point I thin most would prefer a slightly-frankensteinian monster-language that you'd get by taking either Kotlin or Swift and bolting all the other features…
The languages are quite different though and there are good reasons for using different ones in different places:
1. Kotlin is basically modern Java, and is therefore an obvious choice for Android which still runs everything in a JVM.
2. Go was basically designed to run network services and it is very good at it. The standard library is excellent (probably the best of any language) and concurrency is pretty easy too.
3. The Flutter team have published their reasoning for using Dart. Can't say I fully agree with all of them but it is a reasonably nice language (way better than Javascript anyway - although I know that doesn't take much) and developing with it is really pleasant.
I don't know why TF chose Swift though. It looks like a nice enough language though.
There are definitely significant differences between all of those languages. It's not like they're using a mixture of Javascript, Typescript, Flow and Dart. That would be silly.
Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#45It seems to me that a lot of people seem to think prefering Kotlin signifies a move away from Java. But I simply don't understand how using a JVM language signifies a move away from Java. After all, it all gets compiled into the same bytecode, and Kotlin heavily depends on the Java ecosystem. If Oracle is 'poisoning Java', Kotlin's not the answer. Surely, it'd be a language totally independent of Oracle, wouldn't it?
Kotlin on Android ultimately runs on Google's ART, not a JVM implementation, think MS J++. Also JetBrains is betting on moving Kotlin beyond the JVM, to all platforms it can reach. The latest version of kotlinc is now built with Kotlin/Native.
ART?
Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kotlin on Android ultimately runs on Google's ART, not a JVM implementation, think MS J++. Also JetBrains is betting on moving Kotlin beyond the JVM, to all platforms it can reach. The latest version of kotlinc is now built with Kotlin/Native.
ART?
Android Runtime
Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kotlin has its own (much better IMO) alternative to streams: Sequence. I see absolutely no reason to use streams in Kotlin.
One simple reason: you already know streams and don't have time to learn sequence.
Streams is mostly just Java's version of what many languages already had, so the concept was something new to learn for Java developers, but once they know it they shouldn't have much trouble with Kotlin's sequences – or with Python's list comprehensions, Lisp's mapcar, and so on.
Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#48It seems to me that a lot of people seem to think prefering Kotlin signifies a move away from Java. But I simply don't understand how using a JVM language signifies a move away from Java. After all, it all gets compiled into the same bytecode, and Kotlin heavily depends on the Java ecosystem. If Oracle is 'poisoning Java', Kotlin's not the answer. Surely, it'd be a language totally independent of Oracle, wouldn't it?
Kotlin on Android ultimately runs on Google's ART, not a JVM implementation, think MS J++. Also JetBrains is betting on moving Kotlin beyond the JVM, to all platforms it can reach. The latest version of kotlinc is now built with Kotlin/Native.
The Kotlin compiler still runs on the JVM. The native compiler is actually built with Excelsior JET, not with Kotlin/Native. (I think Nikolay Igotti, the Kotlin/Native lead, mentioned somewhere that the JVM is often faster for the kind of graph manipulation that the compiler does a lot of.)
Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#49...great, Kotlin for Android, Dart for Flutter, on the ML side they're starting to adopt Swift, for networking infra code Go. What the heck is with this "tower of babel"?! Are other people not bothered by the overlapping features of all these languages? At this point I thin most would prefer a slightly-frankensteinian monster-language that you'd get by taking either Kotlin or Swift and bolting all the other features…
Without the "tower of babel" that exists you wouldn't get Rust or TypeScript, D, Swift or Julia.
Given that you mentioned them, I'm assuming you have some preference for them. So the world you'd live in would be a world in which your preferred languages wouldn't exist.
I guess that would be fine for some people, but not me or people like me. So there you have your answer.
Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#50...great, Kotlin for Android, Dart for Flutter, on the ML side they're starting to adopt Swift, for networking infra code Go. What the heck is with this "tower of babel"?! Are other people not bothered by the overlapping features of all these languages? At this point I thin most would prefer a slightly-frankensteinian monster-language that you'd get by taking either Kotlin or Swift and bolting all the other features…
The languages are quite different though and there are good reasons for using different ones in different places: 1. Kotlin is basically modern Java, and is therefore an obvious choice for Android which still runs everything in a JVM. 2. Go was basically designed to run network services and it is very good at it. The standard library is excellent (probably the best of any language) and concurrency is pretty easy too.…
I suspect that TF "chose" Swift because Chris Lattner (the creator of Swift) joined Google, and he managed to convince people that it would be a good idea.