Kotlin can overtake Java for Android development, claims Realm report
Google at the I/O 2017 Developers Conference in May this year had announced that Kotlin will be an officially supported language in Android. It would join the list of existing programming languages used for Android app development, such as Java and C++.
Now, according to a new report released last week by Realm, a mobile development platform, Kotlin is expected to surpass Java as the primary programming language used for Android apps by December 2018.
For those unaware, Kotlin was a little-known programming language until the above announcement was made by Google. Developed by Jetbrains for JVM (Java Virtual Machine), Android, JS browser and native applications, Kotlin can be compiled to Java source code and be used alongside Java to build apps. Like Java, Kotlin as a language is object oriented and statically typed and fully interoperable with Java code. It is designed to solve similar problem that Java does. It also adds a lot of nice-to-have features that Java itself doesn’t currently support, a much cleaner syntax, improved code readability, ideas from functional programming, and other improvements over Java. Also, Kotlin’s interoperability with Java makes it possible to call Kotlin code from Java or Java code from Kotlin.
The first edition of new Realm Report states that Kotlin’s adoption has increased tremendously among Android app developers after Google’s announcement. This quarterly publication is based on the analysis of its more than 100,000 active developers that takes a comprehensive look as to what is currently happening with mobile development, and offer their predictions of where things are going in the future.
“Since Google blessed Kotlin as an acceptable language on Android, which happened in May at Google I/O, Kotlin use has just exploded,” said Paul Kopacki, veep of marketing at Realm told in an interview to The Register. “We think by the end of next year, Kotlin will have eclipsed Java for Android apps.”
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