Kotlin has experienced an accelerated rate of adoption and rapid growth of tooling support. Some of the reasons behind its popularity are its concise syntax, null safety, ease of transition from Java and interoperability with other JVM-based languages in general, and that it doubles as a great introductory language to functional programming. With JetBrains adding the ability to compile Kotlin to native binaries on multiple platforms, as well as transpile to JavaScript, we believe it has the potential of much wider use by the larger community of mobile and native application developers. Although at the time of writing, some of the tooling such as static and coverage code analysis have yet to mature, given our experience of using Kotlin in many production applications, we believe Kotlin is ready for general adoption.
The announcement of first-class Android support has given an extra boost to the rapidly progressing Kotlin language, and we're closely following the progress of Kotlin/Native — the LLVM-backed ability to compile to native executables. Null safety, data classes and the ease of creating DSLs are some of the benefits we've enjoyed, along with the Anko library for Android development. Despite the downsides of slow initial compilation and reliance on IntelliJ for first-class IDE support, we recommend giving this fresh and concise modern language a try.
The Kotlin programming language is on many of our developers' bucket lists to assess this year, and some have already used it successfully in production. It is an open source JVM language from JetBrains. Our Swift mobile developers like it as it is syntactically closer to Swift and equally concise. Our Java developers have enjoyed its seamless interoperability with the Java language and tools and found it easier to learn than Scala. Kotlin supports functional programming concepts but with less features than Scala. Developers on our teams who like static typing with the compiler catching null pointer defects found themselves writing fewer boilerplate tests.
