Kotlin

Kotlin is a modern cross-platform, general-purpose programming language with type inference. It was designed to interoperate fully with Java and Java Class Library, but its type inference makes its syntax more concise.

A bit of Kotlin history

The name comes from Kotlin Island, near St. Petersburg. In July 2011, JetBrains company started a new Project Kotlin, a new language for the JVM. The development lead Andrey Breslav claimed that “Kotlin is designed to be an industrial-strength object-oriented language, and a better language than Java, but still be fully interoperable with Java code, allowing companies to make a gradual migration from Java to Kotlin.” In 2019, Google announced Kotlin as its preferred programming language for Android app developers.

What’s unique about Kotlin?

Kotlin is an OOP-based programming language where a line of code can be cut up to 40%, making Kotlin an ideal choice for software development or web development. From 2016 to 2017, Kotlin became very popular within one year due to its excellent programming capabilities. This programming language can support various extension features without making any code changes. Besides, Kotlin has its distinctive architecture for allocating memory and delivering quality results for developers and end-users.

The most famous solutions developed with Kotlin

Many companies like Netflix, Pinterest, Trello, Slack, Pinterest, Kickstarter, and Corda use Kotlin to build robust Android apps. 

1. Google has officially declared Kotlin as its first-class programming language for Android development. Google also uses Kotlin in their production code and continues to improve the Kotlin experience. Google is currently promoting Kotlin through SDK, Android KTX, Kotlin examples in official documentation, and online Kotlin course.
2. Trello, a popular collaboration tool, is used worldwide to organize collective projects via boards with anyone and anywhere. Trello team Kotlinized their functions and creating new features in Kotlin.
3. Slack is a famous business communication platform developed by Slack Technologies. It’s designed to organize the team members with chat rooms, private groups, and instant messaging. According to its tech stack, it uses Kotlin in its Android environment.
4. Corda is an open-source Blockchain platform for businesses, and it is entirely built on Kotlin language because of its scalability, cross-platform runtime, and thread-safe architecture. They claimed to pick Kotlin because of its interoperability with Java and functional programming.

Kotlin pros and cons

Advantages of Kotlin:

• It is concise, so it drastically reduces the amount of boilerplate code;
• It is safe and allows to avoid entire classes of errors such as null pointer exceptions;
• It is interoperable; it leverages existing libraries for the JVM, Android, and the browser;
• It is tool-friendly, so you can choose any Java IDE (Integrated Development Environment) or build from the command line;
• You can quickly replace Java code with Kotlin as it is 100% Java and Android compatible;
• Kotlin has a strong community, as JetBrains is continuously improving the language;
• The founders added Gradle support so that developers can write Gradle files in Kotlin. They are actively developing Kotlin/Native, which allows building iOS applications. 
• It combines the best of functional and procedural programming.

Disadvantages of Kotlin:

• If you are thinking of changing your company’s approach to Android app development, it can require additional expenses on training the team;
• It has a slower compilation speed comparing to Java;
• There are still fewer Korlin programmers available to recruit.

But if you work with UppLabs, you’ll find no difficulties using Kotlin as we provide professional Kotlin development.

Why UppLabs chose Kotlin? 

There are numerous reasons why our team prefers to use Kotlin:

•  Kotlin allows writing less code, resulting in fewer bugs and less time spent on coding, and less money spent on development!
• Kotlin can solve many challenges, like the type system that can help to avoid null pointer exceptions;
• The developers have access to all Java frameworks and libraries while writing more clear and concise code in Kotlin.