Scala was designed to be better Java and has lived up to that expectation. It came from academia, which likes to experiment with some cool features of functional programming and mixing paradigms. While Scala has been popular, another language which is based on Java uses JVM and is compatible with Java has gained attention in recent years – Kotlin. It was officially supported by Google in Android Studio 3.0 (Oct 2017)
What is Kotlin?
Kotlin is another statically typed language that runs on JVM. It can be compiled to byte-code just like Java or it could be compiled to JavaScript. It was developed by a software company JetBrains out of the need to have a better Java that helps boost the productivity of the developers by providing some built-in functionalities.
Key features of Kotlin
- Null-pointer safety
- Extension functions
- Nested Functions
- Deconstructor methods (not to be confused with destructor)
- classes are Public and Final by default
- Completely object-oriented (even primitive types such as numbers are objects)
Scala and Kotlin are very comparable languages as both of them work on JVM and have Java as their base. One of the reasons why this language was developed instead of using Scala was the compilation time that Scala took.
Kotlin has got good community and tooling support as well. One can convert existing Java code to Kotlin with IDE support. It can use existing Java frameworks and libraries.
With the support from frameworks such as Anko and Kovenant, this language is gaining popularity in the Android community. This was endorsed by Google’s announcement to support Kotlin in Android Studio 3.0 in Oct-2017. Apart from Java and C++, this is the only other supported language for Android.
Related Links
Related Keywords
Scala, Programming, Android, Google, Functional Programming, Lambda Expressions
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