Why Use Kotlin Over Java For Android Development?

Android apps have become an integral part of our daily lives; many businesses use Android apps to communicate with their customers. choosing the best programming language for Android development can be a mammoth task.

Java

Java is a simple, powerful, and robust object-oriented programming language that is suitable for many purposes such as building and managing Android applications, web applications, server applications, embedded systems, big data, and more.

Kotlin goes public

From ndevelopers to software development companies, the adoption of Kotlin has increased manifold. In the results of the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Kotlin is second only to Rust as the most popular programming languages.

Java issues addressed by kotlin

NullSafety – Kotlin’s type system is aimed at eliminating the dangers of these null references. This was one of the most common pitfalls in Java – and in many other programming languages ​​as well.

No more raw types – Kotlin is designed with Java interoperability in mind. So now existing Java code can be efficiently called from Kotlin.

Invariant arrays – The basic types used in Kotlin are numbers, arrays, characters, and strings. Unlike Java, arrays are invariant in this programming language. This avoids possible runtime failure, which is one of the problems that Java faces.

Function types — In Kotlin, a lambda expression or anonymous function can access variables declared in an outer scope.

Web variance – Wildcard types are one of the most complex parts of the Java Type System. This problem does not occur in Kotlin, because it has no wildcard types, only type projections and declarative site deviations.

Exceptions — Kotlin has no checked exceptions because all exception classes in the language are descendants of the Throwable class. And each exception has a message, a stack trace, and an optional cause.

Why choose kotlin?

Smart casts

Working with mixed types requires knowing the object’s type at runtime in order to safely cast the object to the desired type and then call methods or access properties on it.

Singletons

A user needs to create an object that slightly modifies a class, but without explicitly declaring a new subclass. Java handles this case using anonymous inner classes, but Kotlin generalizes the same concept using object expressions and declarations.

Data classes

The whole purpose of creating classes is to hold data, and in some classes standard functions with helper functions can be mechanically derived from that data. This is known as a data class in Kotlin. These classes generally contain some old standard code in the form of toString, hashcode, equals, setters, and getters.

Conclusion

Kotlin is much better than Java for Android development because it takes care of the disadvantages of Java. Moreover, switching from Java to Kotlin is easy and anyone interested in programming can make good progress in a short time.