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Google pushes for Kotlin as the preferred language for app development

At the Google I/O developer conference, the tech giant announced that Android development would become increasingly โ€˜Kotlin-first,โ€™ as the company doubles down on its support of the Kotlin language for Android mobile development. Kotlin, the JVM-based alternative to Java, is a cross-platform, statically typed, general-purpose programming language with type inference. It is designed to inter-operate […]

At the Google I/O developer conference, the tech giant announced that Android development would become increasingly โ€˜Kotlin-first,โ€™ as the company doubles down on its support of the Kotlin language for Android mobile development.

Kotlin, the JVM-based alternative to Java, is a cross-platform, statically typed, general-purpose programming language with type inference. It is designed to inter-operate fully with Java, and the type inference allows its syntax to be more concise.

โ€œMany new Jetpack APIs and features will be offered first in Kotlin. If youโ€™re starting a new project, you should write it in Kotlin; code written in Kotlin often mean much less code for youโ€“less code to type, test, and maintain.โ€

Google

It was only two years ago that Google announced its support for Kotlin in its Android Studio IDE at I/O 2017. This news came as a surprise, given that Java had long dominated Android app development.

In the past two years, Kotlinโ€™s popularity has grown with more than 50% of professional Android developers now using the language to develop their apps, and in the latest Stack Overflow developer survey, Kotlin is ranked as the fourth-most loved programming language.

But Google also confirmed that Google still supports the use of Java and C++ for Android development.

The company also announced ten new libraries for Android Jetpack, a set of components, tools, and guidance built to accelerate app development. The company also introduced Jetpack Compose, a new unbundled Kotlin toolkit.

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