I can talk about this in the context of Android.įirst I should point out that many large Android apps are using Kotlin. But first-class official support means that, for example, if Google adds a new feature to the Android Runtime, they will, where relevant, now ensure it's implemented in the official Android Kotlin compiler as well as the Java compiler. I was answering their question generically. You can mix java and kotlin files in the same app and call methods from one to the other without problems. > This makes me think you don't know how kotlin works. Just because Go, Haskell, C and LuaJIT all target x86 assembly does not mean a Linux kernel update won't break a properly-written program in one of those languages but not the others. They share the same compilation target, not the same semantics and idioms. So from the point of view of the platform there is no difference between kotlin and java. Because the good thing about kotlin is that it is transparent, it generates bytecode as java does. > then it also breaks the same app written in java. If all Jetbrains employees were abducted by aliens tomorrow, Google will now still have committed to first-class support of Kotlin through the next couple of major versions of Android. Regardless of how the work involved in supporting Kotlin on Android is split, this represents a guarantee that did not exist before. The headline here is 'Google officially supports Kotlin on Android,' and that is what has HN so excited. Jetbrains isn't doing anything differently with Kotlin from what they've been doing for the past 7 years. Google is only going to collaborate with JetBrains to help with the Android support.

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