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Android now supports Kotlin

venturebeat.com

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Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#31

Post by bitmapbrother »

deskamess wrote: post #17
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…

New to Kotlin + ecosystem... So can you build Android UI's with Scene Builder? I see notes about it working with Gluon Mobile which appears to be a cross platform mobile library.

No, Android does not support JavaFX or Swing for that matter.

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#32

Post by Larrikin »

monkmartinez wrote: post #15

So where is the best place to learn Kotlin? I am very interested as Jetbrains is also working on Kotlin to native translation. [1] [1] https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2017/04/kotlinnative-tech-...

If you're already familiar with Android dev, using the built in Convert Java to Kotlin feature in Android Studio is invaluable, especially in the beginning.

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#33

Post by narrator »

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.

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#34

Post by arkadiytehgraet »

mandude wrote: post #13
bobsam wrote: post #3

Was hoping for golang but this is good too

Why haven't they supported Go on android?

Because to support a language you need 2 things:

1) interoperability between existing ecosystem and APIs

2) development environment support.

In case of Kotlin Google had to do nothing: Kotlin is 100% interoperable with existing Java code and libraries, including Android APIs; as for the development environment, JetBrains (the company behind Intellij IDEA and Kotlin itself) provides the same level of development experience for Kotlin as for Java, which means that Android Studio gets the very same nice features for Kotlin.

Now, how would they get the same with Go? For interoperability they would need to either generate tens of thousands of bindings for existing APIs and provide a convenient way to include compiled Go binary as a static library. It is highly doubtful they actually can do, since they have been having troubles to do it for C or C++ code for a very long time. Or as alternative they can improve their support for native code, which then can be used as a base for interoperation with Go code; however it is still considerably less pleasant way to do things than in case of Java + Kotlin.

Now, as for the development environment, Google will have to basically create yet another IDE on top of Android Studio to support Go; they might take an existing plugin (which is not that great, compared to Kotlin support in AS/Intellij), but it means that they would have to collaborate in development on it, which in case of Google takes too much time. Another indicator of how difficult for them implement at least someway decent support for another language on their own is situation with native code - it's being in development for like 3 years, and still is highly unusable.

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#35

Post by tsvetkov »

geodel wrote: post #14
bobsam wrote: post #3

Was hoping for golang but this is good too

I think Go is never going to be officially supported on Android. Dart, though, seems more likely as it is Java like VM based language. Go is going to have better support on Fuchsia OS from Google.

Dart is not a JVM Language. It can be compiled to the JavaScript or run in the Dart VM.

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#37

Post by jshevek »

jorgemf wrote: post #6

If you have used kotlin, it seems the obvious move. I am not coming back to java, unless completely necessary. Kotlin is a great language (and more fun!).

Kotlin is an absolute pleasure to code in, far better than Java. Add in such easy mixing with Java code, and it's by far my favorite JVM language.

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#38

Post by 0xFFC »

After becoming first officially supported non java language in android now, All eyes are on kotlin native!

If they can deliver good kotlin native experience, then kotlin is unbeatable

Re: Android now supports Kotlin

#39

Post by bitmapbrother »

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.

Dart runs all of their AdSense code. I also believe your information about the usage of Go at Google is also out of date.
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