Introduce everything about Kotlin and the top 5 reasons to use it

Tram Ho

Hello everyone, today cafedev will synthesize and introduce in detail about Kotlin, one of the new languages ​​of Google, used to develop Android applications and some other applications in the Google ecosystem. So what is Kotlin? and what’s new compared to Java. This article will help ae develop solve that problem.

Google I / O 2017 ended with a series of announcements and developments the world saw in practice. One of them is the use of Kotlin as the official language to develop Android applications. Industry giant announced plans to use Kotlin, along with Java and C ++ as a programming language to develop Android Apps.

The programming language is run on the JVM (Java virtual machine), just like JAVA. Developed by the Russian-based JetBrain developer team, Kotlin uses the infrastructure of the LLVM compiler or can be assembled into JavaScript source code.

Again, in this article, we will see what makes Kotlin the desired language among the leading Android application development companies in the world.

Preliminary turn to Kotlin

Kotlin is a modern and future-oriented programming language, it has been replacing the Java language for Android development.

The latest version of Kotlin is 1.3. Kotlin is a type of static programming language. This means that variables of this type will be considered for processing at compile time instead of at runtime. The basic examples of static programming languages ​​other than Kotlin are C, C ++, C #, Java, Scala, JADE, Ada and Pascal.

The Kotlin language can be used for:

Kotlin can be used for developing various web and mobile applications, such as Server-side web, Android app, Mobile app, Client-side with JavaScript and Data Science.

Java vs Kotlin

Kotlin can work with Java at the same time. That means you can add Kotlin code to your current project even if it’s Java-based. Because of using two-dimensional Kotlin, Android application developers can call the Java language from Kotlin or vice versa. That’s why kotlin is quite different from other languages.

JetBrains has started working on Kotlin, a static programming language, running on the Java virtual machine (JVM). JetBrains has done a remarkable job by incorporating the Kotlin programming language in the IDE (Android Studio) based on the IntelliJ platform. Google has announced that they are turning Kotlin into a first-class language for writing or developing Android applications. We have 5 reasons why Kotlin becomes the official programming language for developing Android applications.

Reasons why Kotlin becomes the official programming language for Android Application Development:

  • 100% interoperability with Java.
  • Kotlin is safe
  • Efficiency
  • It is short
  • Great support for tools and IDEs

Top 5 reasons to use Kotlin

100% interoperability with Java

The main reason why Kotlin becomes the first-class language in Android is because it runs smoothly on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine). JetBrains has developed Kotlin as a JVM programming language, making it 100% compatible with the Java programming language. Android developers can use a lot of Java libraries while writing code for Android apps when using Kotlin. Android developers can generate Java code from Kotlin code using the converters provided by JetBrains.

Kotlin is safe

Android developer is most painful while writing java code with exception of null pointer. It is hard to imagine that the developer server suffered a NullPointerException while writing the code. The most common limitation in many programming languages. Including Java is that accessing an object of a NULL reference will result in the exception of the NULL reference.

Kotlin eliminates most null reference sources by making all of them non-null when creating default values ​​- meaning the compiler will not allow you to use an uninitialized variable, a variable. not nullable. If you need a variable to hold a null value, you must declare the type as null, adding a question mark after that type.

Efficiency

When it comes to speed, Kotlin doesn’t outperform Java. but, the programming language, Kotlin speeds up the execution of lambda functions by supporting inline functions. It has a compact runtime library and has a few more methods than Java at runtime.

It is short

The class written in Kotlin is shorter and more compact than the class written in the Java programming language. That means less code in Kotlin, it’s like an official programming language. Kotlin has reduced boilerplate code compared to Java. Therefore, the code written in Kotlin is quite compact. Save development time, less errors and ultimately reduce costs. It is the main reason behind the popularity of kotlin in a short period of time.

Great support for tools and IDEs

Android developers can take advantage of IDEs, including Android Studio. It is designed as a complete support tool for Kotlin. Developers can code Android apps with Kotlin more efficiently and with the development tools provided by the Kotlin team. The Android extension to remove findViewById () function using Kotlin. The Android extension is an extension that allows Android application developers to eliminate the findViewById () calls in the code and replace them with computer-generated properties. Android extensions allow programmers to replace the findViewById () function with properties created by the compiler. They use libraries like Anko (Kotlin Library) to speed up the process of developing Android applications. All of these components help Android application deveopers keep application code much easier to read and clean.

Some of its disadvantages

Runtime Size

Kotlin’s standard runtime library will increase your .apk size. Although this is only equivalent to about 800KB, if your application is already large then that 800KB can make the app heavy and cause users to think twice before downloading your application.

The original readability

Although Kotlin’s concise syntax is one of the biggest strengths of the language, at first you may find some Kotlin code confusing, simply because there is a lot of code going on in such a small amount of code like so. Java can be more verbose, but the downside is that everything is written clearly, which means that strange Java code tends to understand code better than the unfamiliar Kotlin. In addition, if used incorrectly, overloading the Kotlin operator, can lead to code that is hard to read.

Kotlin has quickly gained popularity among deveopers in a short period of time and has become the official language for developing Android applications.

You can find out more here:

https://kotlinlang.org/docs

https://developer.android.com/kotlin/index.html

https://fabiomsr.github.io/from-java-to-kotlin/index.html

Have you spoken this language ?, Please share with us some of your opinions about this language?

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Source : Techtalk