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Android now supports Kotlin

venturebeat.com

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Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#101

Post by vorg »

fishywang wrote: post #77

I hope this will change Jetbrain's attitude towards supporting Kotlin Android rules in Bazel (or anything other than gradle). Last time I asked, they are not very interested[1]. [1] https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/android-support-in-kotlinc-...

Don't forget you can use Kotlin to write your build files for Gradle (since Gradle 3.0 was released almost a year ago) which Android Studio auto-completes 100% of the time (rather than 80% of the time as with Apache Groovy). Gradle 3.0 also switched to Kotlin as its "preferred" language for writing addins, so conceivably you could use the Kotlin language for everything in the Android build chain.

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#103

Post by meddlepal »

dep_b wrote: post #53
0xFFC wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a little bit of drop in java ranking

God I hope so. Every time I see Java up there I feel the suffering of a million souls having to deal with it.

I write Kotlin on the backend now mostly but I never really minded writing Java either. It's a boring and predictable language with great tooling.

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#104

Post by throwasehasdwi »

dhfhduk wrote: post #71
allover wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what it has to do with relationships. Convince us why Scala would've been a better choice?

I have nothing against Kotlin. It seems to be coming out of nowhere to surpass more "tested" languages for lack of a better way of putting it, but as I'm reading about it I can truly see the appeal. The one thing I'm having trouble figuring out, though, is how much it diverges from Java in terms of inheritance, traits, etc. The verbosity of Java is one thing, but its inheritance system is what made me want to pull my…

JetBrians is possibly the best company on the planet to implement syntax improvements to Java, which is basically what Kotlin is.

They have deep experience with the syntax of a bunch of different languages. They know what Java is missing because they've seen a ton of different things in diverse languages.

Looking at Kotlin myself, they got rid of almost all of the painful syntactical blunders in Java. I'm seriously considering picking it up for my next project just looking at their main page. It looks fantastic.

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#105

Post by floatboth »

Nullabillity wrote: post #26
gecko wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is JavaFX also included in the "safe" parts of Java (i.e., in an Oracle-sanctioned GPL VM)? I know there are some open-source versions, but Oracle's trigger-happy lawsuit button on Java these days has made me nervous to poke.

OpenJFX is part of Oracle's OpenJDK project.

It even works on FreeBSD https://www.freshports.org/java/openjfx8-devel/ so yeah, truly cross-platform open source GUI :)

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#106

Post by izacus »

geodel wrote: post #5

Well this looks like going to push Kotlin in big league. I remember scala enthusiasts made big noise in last few years to have scala as officially supported language. But Google seems to prefer a closer relationship with Jetbrains.

The newest version of Scala (2.12) requires a JVM with Java 8 feature compatibility which makes it unusable on Android devices. Google would literally be stuck supporting an obsolete version of a language that's not developed... or restrict the use of it only to Android O and newer making it dead on arrival.

Kotlin compiler generates code that's runnable on JVMs supporting Java 6, which makes it work on pretty much any Android device, even running older Androids.

Scala standard library is also huge and pretty much immediately hits the 64K method limit of DEX files forcing you to use the very slow proguard compilation step when running it. It also has issues with interoperability with existing Java 6 code.

All in all, Scala is a terrible value proposition in comparison to Kotlin which was built from ground up to modernize programming while still keeping full compatibility with Java 6 code and JVMs stuck on Java 6 language level.

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#107

Post by floatboth »

mangoman wrote: post #60

This is pretty big. I really like Kotlin, but when I tried to integrate it into my app, it just didn't play well with popular libraries which rely on compile time code generation (Google's Dagger fork, Icepick, Parcels, etc). Has support for this improved / is it easy to integrate?

Annotation processing has been improving a lot https://medium.com/@workingkills/pushing-the-limits-of-kotli...

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#108

Post by tomc1985 »

invalidname wrote: post #59
tomc1985 wrote: post #2

Funny, I was messing around with Kotlin for the first time last night. So far, the language seems well-structured and I really like that one gets all of Java's ecosystem without actually having to write java. (Also, "override fun" just sounds hilarious. Bwaha!) Throw in TornadoFX and Gluon Scene Builder (formerly of Oracle) and you're spinning up high-quality cross-platform GUIs faster than Atom, with a visual editor…

The problem is its performance on the device and size overhead is horrible. Javafxpackager is just about the worse too. Check out Codename One which is more like Swing but far more robust. The GUI builder isn't as refined as scene builder but the final product actually works everywhere and far more portable than anything else.

Those are good points, thanks for the heads up

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#109

Post by dhfhduk »

vbezhenar wrote: post #89
dhfhduk wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have nothing against Kotlin. It seems to be coming out of nowhere to surpass more "tested" languages for lack of a better way of putting it, but as I'm reading about it I can truly see the appeal. The one thing I'm having trouble figuring out, though, is how much it diverges from Java in terms of inheritance, traits, etc. The verbosity of Java is one thing, but its inheritance system is what made me want to pull my…

Kotlin didn't change, the only difference is `trait` keyword replaced with `interface` keyword. But I'm not really getting this article. Inheritance is key principle of Object-Oriented Programming, throwing it away would be very stupid move. It could be abused, but everything could. Kotlin solves this in pragmatic way: if you need inheritance, you must declare it explicitly. If you want delegation, Kotlin got you cov…

Thanks. This is helpful. I guess part of what I'm wondering is how much Kotlin interfaces compare to Scala traits in the sense explained here:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Scala/Traits

Or, in another example, how does use of Rust impl map onto Kotlin?

http://www.jonathanturner.org/2016/02/down-the-rabbit-hole-w...

I really don't mean this as a criticism of Kotlin, I'm just trying to map this all out. Kotlin seems nice and like something I could use, but I'm sure it has its boundaries also.

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#110

Post by kodablah »

Entangled wrote: post #97
kbumsik wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This news sounds quite opposite to me. Although adding a new language is always a good news but Kotlin won't solve any problems with Oracle, since it is just another JVM language. This news sounds like Google is going for an easier way instead of ditching Oracle stuff.

> since it is just another JVM language Not for long, they're working on Kotlin Native which will make it completely independent from the JVM and portable to all platforms. Killer.

That's with Kotlin's much smaller runtime. It's the stdlib that matters, not the language. Which is why the JVM or an emulated version of it will be around on Android for a long time.
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