For example, we can declare a regular variable type string as either capable of holding null values or not. As I said before, Kotlin was designed by JetBrains, the same people who designed Intellij. I think that is obvious that IntelliJ works really well with Kotlin. You can easily start a new project with your IntelliJ, you don’t have to install any extensions.

The App class acts as the entry point, and the UI is constructed using Kotlin’s DSL capabilities. Ktor’s interceptors allow developers to define custom middleware that can process requests and responses at different stages. Kotlin’s creators made the language as simple and brief as possible. This reduces code cluttering to a minimum, ensuring that every line has meaning and isn’t just there for structure’s sake. There’s a variety of ways Kotlin can be applied for different domains, and the list of possible uses is still growing. The editorial team of the Toptal Engineering Blog extends its gratitude to Thomas Wuillemin for reviewing the code samples and other technical content presented in this article.

It’s known as an excellent general-purpose programming language, capable of building complex applications that handle a huge number of users. Kotlin may not be the first choice for cross-platform development, but this use of the language is gaining popularity among developers. With Kotlin Multiplatform, a software development kit meant for creating cross-platform apps, you can use one code base for both your Android and iOS projects. As a statically typed language, Kotlin was initially designed to run on the JVM. However, it is also possible to compile Kotlin code to JavaScript.

Updated Kotlin roadmap for 2023 ↗

Note that in this case the resulting bytecode might not run on lower versions. Starting with Kotlin 1.5, the compiler does not support producing bytecode compatible with Java versions below 8. Our Learn Kotlin course is perfect if you’re a new developer or new to the Kotlin language. It’ll introduce you to fundamental programming concepts and teach you how to write Kotlin code. Kotlin was designed to be a better language than Java and interoperable with Java. Its simplicity and interoperability were the incentives to learn Kotlin.

Gabriel has worked on multimillion-dollar apps and has industry experience at companies like HBO and Yahoo. Kotlin compiles to the same byte code as Java, interoperates with Java classes in natural ways, and shares its tooling with Java. Because there is no overhead for calling back and forth between Kotlin and Java, adding Kotlin incrementally to an Android app currently in Java makes perfect sense. The few cases where the interoperability between Kotlin and Java code lacks grace, such as Java set-only properties, are rarely encountered and easily fixed. Of course, Kotlin is not perfect and it has some detriments. For example, it is not the best programming language for beginners.

Kotlin can be added to earlier versions of Android Studio with a plug-in. One of the hottest new programming languages, Kotlin is being prioritised by some of the world’s leading companies. Since first hitting the scene in 2016, this open-source language has quickly built a reputation as one of the key pillars to the future of development.

Kotlin (programming language)

Kotlin may also inject an assertion into the code at compile time to avoid triggering an actual null pointer exception. There’s no explicit language notation for a platform type, but in the event Kotlin has to report a platform type, such as in an error message, it appends ! Up until May 2017, the only officially supported programming languages for Android were Java and C++. Google announced official support for Kotlin on Android at Google I/O 2017, and starting with Android Studio 3.0 Kotlin is built into the Android development toolset.

This type inference reduces the need for explicit type declarations, making code cleaner. One of Kotlin’s major strengths is its null safety feature. In Java, null pointer exceptions are a common cause of app crashes. Kotlin addresses this issue by making all types non-nullable by default.

The question of whether to choose Kotlin or Scala doesn’t come up often in the Android community. If you look at GitHub (as of October 2022) and search for Android repositories, you’ll find about 50,000 that use Java, 24,000 that use Kotlin, and (ahem) 73 that use Scala. Yes, it’s possible to write Android applications in Scala, but few developers bother. To override a superclass method, the method itself must be marked open, and the subclass method must be marked override. This is all of a piece with Kotlin’s philosophy of making things explicit rather than relying on defaults. For Groovy fans, Kotlin implements builders; in fact, Kotlin builders can be type checked.

Kotlin is a programming language that was released in 2011 by JetBrains, a company that sells integrated development environments (IDEs) for programming languages. Since then, it’s become a favorite language for developers and replaced Java in many software projects. Java is known for its versatility since it was originally created with the concept of “Write Once, Run Everywhere” in mind. It is, however, mostly used for backend and Android development – after all, most Android apps used to be written in Java.

For almost anyone doing Android development, the advantages of Kotlin are compelling. The typical rough estimate indicates approximately a 40% cut in the number of lines of code from Java to Kotlin. Originally, Kotlin’s creator, Dmitry Jemerov, required features Java didn’t have.

Kotlin has quickly risen to prominence as the preferred language for Android app development. In my opinion, non-nullability is one of the greatest https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ Kotlin features. This feature saves time because developers don’t have to handle NullPointerExceptions (which are RuntimeExceptions).

Kotlin’s integration with libraries like Krangl offers data manipulation capabilities akin to Python’s pandas. This allows for filtering, grouping, and reshaping data with ease. This allows for a modular design, making components reusable and testable. TornadoFX simplifies data binding with observable properties. This ensures that UI elements can react to data changes without complex listeners. Setting up a basic TornadoFX application is straightforward.

For developers, perhaps the most obvious benefit of using Kotlin is the fact that they need to write way less code in comparison to Java. It’s generally estimated that using Kotlin reduces the amount of code by around 40%, which makes it less prone to possible mistakes and easier to maintain. It’s a more comfortable language to work with, which is why it’s gained its popularity in the first place. When it comes to Android development, it’s rather a given that the future belongs to Kotlin. Kotlin is the language recommended for Android development and it is mainly used for this purpose. This includes projects written from scratch, as well as modernising those originally written in Java, which was the go-to language for Android before Kotlin.

• In addition, developers praise its lower failure rate, flexibility, easy maintenance, and increased productivity.
• Destructuring declarations decompose an object into multiple variables at once, e.g. a 2D coordinate object might be destructured into two integers, x and y.
• Abstract classes define abstract or “pure virtual” placeholder functions that will be defined in a derived class.
• Kotlin supports Spring and Spring boot framework, so you can use the most popular framework with Kotlin and benefit from the advantages of both of them.
• Kotlin’s key features are interoperability, safety, clarity and tooling support.

This means that from one Kotlin code base, you’ll be able to compile apps that run on not just Android phones but also iPhones and the Apple Watch. This project is currently in the alpha stage but has a lot of promise. As we mentioned, Kotlin is the preferred language for Android development as it allows developers to write more concise, expressive, and safer code. Kotlin introduces the concept of extension functions, allowing developers to add new functions to existing classes without modifying their source code. This is particularly useful for extending Android’s built-in classes.