Kotlin vs Java which one is better

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In this article, we have mentioned what features make Kotlin best Android developer choice than Java.
The interest for Android engineers is considerably more blazing. Software companies are hiring Android developers a lot quicker and more in numbers than some other experts in mobile technology. For this, we did an analysis on many popular job portals and searched many popular programming languages for android app development. Without any doubt Java is still in more demand, but many developers want to switch and start working on new modern Kotlin programming language.

 

Java

As Java is old language, so many software developers have experience on it and feel comfortable to work on them. They can easy understand the code pattern and they have to learn how to use Android SDK to run the app. As we know Java 12 is currently released in March 2019. It contains the following new features –

  • Abortable mixed collections for G1
  • Default CDS archives
  • JVM constants API
  • Microbenchmark suite
  • One AArch64 port, not two
  • Promptly return unused committed memory from G1
  • Shenandoah
  • Switch expressions (JEP 325)



Kotlin

Kotlin is a general-purpose, open-source programming language. It can be used to develop android apps, server-side apps and much more. It is a high level strongly, statically typed language and its code is more concise, readable and easy to understand. Its popularity is growing day by day.

The Kotlin code runs on the JVM and its syntax is much like Java, it first compiles the code into byte code and then runs on the JVM as similar to the Java language. We can use any Java IDE for Kotlin development.

In 2017, android team announced Kotlin as an official language for Android app development. After this announcement a large number of Android users began adopting it.

These are the reasons why we should use kotlin.

  • Kotlin is open source, statically typed programming language.
  • Kotlin is a functional language. There is no need to write lots of code.
  • As it is concise language, it is very easy to read and understand the code pattern.
  • In a very short period of time, it can give better performance.
  • Kotlin is compatible with all the Java based framework.
  • We can easily migrate the old Java codebase to Kotlin. There is automated Java to Kotlin converter included in Kotlin plugin.
  • It supports scalability to expand the application for a massive number of users.
  • Kotlin applications can be deployed in any host that support Java web applications, like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform etc.



Interesting features of Kotlin that are not in Java

As Kotlin is a modern programming language, it contains many new smart features that we miss in java –

Expressiveness

Kotlin is a functional language. There is no need to write lots of code. Like we want to create a data class, the code in java is huge or have to write lots of code, but this gets simpler in Kotlin with the help of data class.

Lambda (Functional Support)

A lambda function is a function that does not need to declare, but we can pass immediately as an expression. This is an anonymous function which is usually created during a function call to act as a function parameter.

Null Safety

In Java, we need to check whether something is null before using it to prevent NullPointerException. Kotlin is null safe as it eliminates the risk of NullPointerException.