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Android now supports Kotlin

venturebeat.com

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Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#121

Post by geodel »

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 has no value for Google. If Google wanted to get rid of JVM technology and idioms on Android then it would be better off with pure native language like Swift/Rust/Go. They all are quite further away from Javaism. Kotlin's great value is mostly because it is Java like and run on JVM.

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#122

Post by fishywang »

vorg wrote: post #101
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.

How would this help people who wants to use Bazel or any other build system other than Gradle?

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#124

Post by on_and_off »

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?

I have a project with Kotlin + Dagger + DataBinding.

Annotation processing works fine with kotlin.

First setup can be a pain though, especially if you are not familiar with Android or the gradle build system.

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#125

Post by kuschku »

geodel wrote: post #121
Entangled wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 has no value for Google. If Google wanted to get rid of JVM technology and idioms on Android then it would be better off with pure native language like Swift/Rust/Go. They all are quite further away from Javaism. Kotlin's great value is mostly because it is Java like and run on JVM.

Kotlin supports automated conversion of Java into Kotlin code.

This means you could quickly transform any existing app into a Kotlin Native app quickly.

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#126

Post by narrator »

threeseed wrote: post #56
narrator wrote: post #33

Oracle winds up killing another golden goose they aquired from Sun. That's what they do though. They buy innovative technology companies who have committed customer bases and then slowly squeeze all the money out of them until they can migrate off. By then they've aquired another set of victim customers.

Not sure what you're rambling about. Java is still and always will be the core language of the JVM. It isn't going anywhere and the Java team (comprising mostly ex-Sun people) continues to push the language forward under Oracle's fantastic stewardship. The issue is that Java is required to be more stable than other languages since it powers so many production, enterprise system and hence will be slower to innovate. I…

I think the Oracle/Google lawsuit drove the decision to adopt Kotlin. Now Google is going to work with JetBrains to develop Kotlin and is going to fork the GPL JVM probably by not including things like the controversial project Jigsaw that IBM voted down. Meanwhile, Oracle is stuck with Java, just like they're stuck with OpenOffice, Hudson, etc.

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#128

Post by V-2 »

giarc wrote: post #115

Anyone know of good online tutorials for Kotlin? I learned Swift for iOS development and customers have been asking for an Android version of my app. Sounds like Kotlin would be a good second language to learn.

The Kotlin plugin (for Android Studio; starting from 3.0 presumably built-in) allows for converting Java code to Kotlin automatically. Obviously the outcome is not necessarily idiomatic Kotlin, just the most straightforward equivalent - but still, it's a very quick way of getting up to speed with the syntax.

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#129

Post by camus2 »

pjmlp wrote: post #27
mandude wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why haven't they supported Go on android?

Java, Python and C++ are the actual workhorse languages at Google. Go doesn't seem to be used that much other than a few known projects like the stuff that got re-written for YouTube or the download server. You see this when new Web APIs are released, usually Go isn't part of the preview SDKs, and on Android all the work done on Go mobile has been done by people on the Go team or from the community at large.

it's fair to say that Go is actually used more outside Google than inside Google. And to be fair I don't see Java or C++ specialists moving to Go when they'll loose a lot of their tooling and language features in the process. I like my enums explicit and my generics ,personally.

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#130

Post by V-2 »

rdsubhas wrote: post #95

I'm curious to know, just from a general understanding - How much of the situation changes when Java 9 releases? Will it lead to some features in Kotlin becoming redundant/unnecessary, some other new features open up in Java 9, grass-is-greener situations, etc?

Java 8 won't be supported on Android, at least not on most devices, for a while still, so I can't see why the release of Java 9 would be a game-changer all of a sudden
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