One of the main points in building a startup is choosing the technology on which your product will be built. This is a very important choice that will affect the entire path of your company in the long run. Today, we will look at the Kotlin programming language.
Kotlin is a relatively young language from the Russian JetBrains company. It appeared in 2011. At the Google I/O 2017 conference, the Android development team announced that Kotlin has received official support for Android app development. Like Java, C, and C++, Kotlin is a statically typed language. It supports both object-oriented and procedural programming.
On Kotlin, the project turns out to be 2-3 times more compact, easier to read, and more reliable in terms of protection against NullPointerException. It is these features that allow Kotlin to reduce the development time and the number of bugs by 2 times, and as a result, the cost of creating and owning a software product.
There is a list the advantages that Kotlin offers out of the box:
- A lot of elements that reduce the boiler plate: data class, getters&setters-significantly reduces the amount of code.
- A more well-thought-out and user-friendly class structure: instead of HashMap, for example, Map (immutable) and MutableMap (mutable) — allow beginners to easily enter the language and focus on the business statement, rather than on the implementation methods.
- Various protections, such as null protection, come Straight out of the box:
var str: String = “”
str = null // this will be a compilation error, not runtime
var nullableStr: String? = null // and so you can
— which leads to significant reductions in program errors and lower support costs.
- At the language level, there is support for asynchronous operations that exist in Python and JS ES6-this makes it easier to work with asynchronous and multithreaded operations compared to Java.
- Kotlin Multiplatform-the ability to compile programs in Kotlin simultaneously for JVM, JS, Native (C/C++, Object C) – allows for reduced code duplication, easier integration with frontends, and more optimal development in the Serverless architecture.
- Domain Specific Language (DSL) – provides a compact and easy-to-read replacement for builders.
- Kotlin is not an academic language that was invented in the scientific community for specific tasks. This is an industrial language created by developers specifically for developing Android apps.
- Conciseness of the language. Kotlin is very similar to Swift. Swift is a very concise language with the ideology that code reads like text in English.
- It is open source, so you can easily identify the problem if it occurs, and report it to the language developers.
Kotlin is not limited to these advantages. But even these advantages should be more than enough, at least to try Kotlin in your work or give you developers to try it.
