Kotlin, the Swift of Android • Hacker News Board

Re: Kotlin, the Swift of Android

#61

Post by dodyg » Mon, Sep 01, 2014, 5:46 PM UTC

Java 8 is not coming to Android anytime soon or ever. Kotlin is quite a nice alternative language for the platform. And the IDE support is superb.

Re: Kotlin, the Swift of Android

#62

Post by benjamins30 » Mon, Sep 01, 2014, 5:52 PM UTC

Does this have the interactive programmer-friendly tools that Swift has?

Re: Kotlin, the Swift of Android

#63

Post by serge2k » Mon, Sep 01, 2014, 5:58 PM UTC

> This means that if text2 is null, the replace() method call is ignored and no NullPointerException is thrown.

I don't understand why this is preferable.

Re: Kotlin, the Swift of Android

#64

Post by udalov » Mon, Sep 01, 2014, 6:04 PM UTC

V-2 wrote: post #38

richardwhiuk wrote: post #10

It would be nice if more of this was folded into Java itself, rather than existing as a new language - as the author notes a lot of it is in Java 8.

Kotlin has stuff that's unlikely to appear in Java, such as reified generics - Java has already chosen type erasure generics instead. I wouldn't bet a penny that they ever change this approach if they didn't go with it from the start.

In fact Kotlin doesn't have reified generics. This idea was planned in the beginning and was reflected in the old docs but abandoned later. I believe there's no reference to reified generics on the new web site anymore.

Re: Kotlin, the Swift of Android

#65

Post by tjdetwiler » Mon, Sep 01, 2014, 6:11 PM UTC

serge2k wrote: post #63

> This means that if text2 is null, the replace() method call is ignored and no NullPointerException is thrown. I don't understand why this is preferable.

It's intended to be shorthand for:

  if (text2 != null) {
    text2.replace()
  }

Essentially they're moving support for @Nullable and @NotNull into the language and compiler.

https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/documentation/howto.html

Re: Kotlin, the Swift of Android

#66

Post by izolate » Mon, Sep 01, 2014, 6:19 PM UTC

A lot of these things are already in Dart, which has a much nicer syntax. If they're going to switch from Java, I'd want them to choose Dart.

Re: Kotlin, the Swift of Android

#67

Post by seanmcdirmid » Mon, Sep 01, 2014, 6:25 PM UTC

izolate wrote: post #66

A lot of these things are already in Dart, which has a much nicer syntax. If they're going to switch from Java, I'd want them to choose Dart.

Dart supports shared memory multi threading?

Re: Kotlin, the Swift of Android

#68

Post by Void_ » Mon, Sep 01, 2014, 6:30 PM UTC

Are there any projects for Swift to JavaScript?

Re: Kotlin, the Swift of Android

#69

Post by reitanqild » Mon, Sep 01, 2014, 6:34 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #36

pavlov wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, thanks for the correction. I had assumed that JetBrain develops Android Studio and Google just puts their stamp on it.

Well that pretty much is what happens. JetBrains wrote IDEA and the Android support for it. Google made some small modifications (some good, some detrimental), and packaged it with the Android SDK. The biggest change was to switch to gradle which is a more powerful build system but also much buggier (at least in the current Android Studio). They also lots of useful Android-related tools and lints, and a fair helping…

Meta: Anybody knows why IshKebab was downvoted?

Re: Kotlin, the Swift of Android

#70

Post by tkubacki » Mon, Sep 01, 2014, 6:36 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #67

izolate wrote: post #66

A lot of these things are already in Dart, which has a much nicer syntax. If they're going to switch from Java, I'd want them to choose Dart.

Dart supports shared memory multi threading?

DART has Erlang style actors that support concurrent threads of execution - so yes. Shared memory no AFAIK, but Dart seems to have nicer syntax.