Android Studio 3.0 Released With Kotlin Support, Java 8 Features

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Android Studio 3.0 Released With Kotlin Support, Java 8 Features

Google today has pushed out Android Studio 3.0 as the latest stable release of this integrated development environment for their mobile operating system...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Android-Studio-3.0-Released

[uid313]

Is Java still the default and recommended programming language for Android and with Kotlin on the side as an alternative?
Or is Kotlin the new main language for Android?

[Brophen]

Is Java still the default and recommended programming language for Android and with Kotlin on the side as an alternative?
Or is Kotlin the new main language for Android?

Java seems to be the main one with both being supported however because a lot of documentation is out there on Java it might take a while to transition. If you are new to Android development though Kotlin seems like the best way to start

source: I am a noob trying to learn Kotlin

[Guest]

Kotlin is more like syntactic sugar - does make reading code easier.

[c117152]

Is Java still the default and recommended programming language for Android and with Kotlin on the side as an alternative?
Or is Kotlin the new main language for Android?

Yes you should develop in Kotlin over Java. Due to licensing issues, Android's Java is stuck at version 7. So, instead of forking, Google decided to adopt a new language that targets the JVM. It's not a great language but it's better than Java and has some useful features like null-safety that overlap well with the to-native compilation that's to come with Google's future capability-based RISC-V core and OS.

[Guest]

c117152 That's not true. Android uses OpenJDK since Android 7.0, and that supports all Java 8 features.

[c117152]

c117152 That's not true. Android uses OpenJDK since Android 7.0, and that supports all Java 8 features.

But the language itself must track Oracle's lead for compatibility's sake which might require certain hardware patents to enable accelerations. It's why Golang doesn't have future-proof pointer operations: They're not sure how patents regarding bounded-pointers and stop-less GC processor cores are going to settle once the new generation of cores will come-out so they've opted for the most cross-compatible approach they could take. Similarly, Go's message passing concurrency can be implemented as conventional co-routine or hardware facilitated memory protected threads (like Mill's turfs). So, regardless of those future patent wars, the language will remain efficient and cross-compatible in 20 years as it is now.

Well to be fair it's all speculations which is why Google is developing multiple language and OS projects to cover all foreseeable possibilities. Still, Java right now is very Oracle bound for both hardware and software so it's obvious why Google is doing what's it's doing with Android and Kotlin.

[grok]

What will run under Android 4? Perhaps that is the question. If you dismiss Android 4 then : what will run under Android 5?
(all I know is an application I looked up targets Android 4.3 and higher)

About Kotlin I read an interesting thing on a couple web sites or comments, namely that it's a clone of Apple Swift, quite simply. There should be differences of course.

[newwen]

These days I don’t trust any Russian software (even if its open source). I hope Google audits well the code it uses from Jetbrains

[woprandi]

Is Java still the default and recommended programming language for Android and with Kotlin on the side as an alternative?
Or is Kotlin the new main language for Android?

You should use Kotlin, the language is much better than Java