At the Google I/O keynote, the Android team announced first-class support for Kotlin. We believe this is a great step for Kotlin, and fantastic news for Android developers as well as the rest of our community.
For Android developers, Kotlin support is a chances to use a modern and powerful language, helping solve common headache such as runtime exceptions and source code verbosity. Kotlin programming is easy to get started with and can be gradually introduced into existing project, which means that your existing skills and technology investment is preserved.
Starting now, Android Studio 3.0 ships with Kotlin out-of-the-box, meaning Android developers no longer need to install any extras or worry about compatibility. It also means that moving forward, you can rest assured that both JetBrains and Google will be supporting Android development in Kotlin Programming.
In case you are concerned about other platform that Kotlin supports (Kotlin/JVM for server and desktop, Kotlin/JS and Kotlin/Native apps), please be sure that they are as important for us as ever. The Company visions here is to make Kotlin a uniform tool for end-to-end development of various application bridging multiple platform of apps with the same language. This includes full-stack web application, Android and iOS clients, embedded/IoT and much more services.
Programming languages are just like human ones: the more people speak a language, the better. First-class support on Android will likely bring more user base to Kotlin, and They expect the community to grow significantly. This mean more libraries and tools developed in/for Kotlin, more experience shared, more Kotlin job offering, more learning materials published, and so on. They are excited to see the Kotlin ecosystem flourish!
One of Kotlin’s goal is to be a language that is available on multiple platform and this will always be the case. They will keep supporting and actively developing Kotlin/JVM (server-side, desktop and other types of applications), and Kotlin/JS. They are working on Kotlin/Native for other platforms such as macOS, iOS and IoT/embedded systems.
Kotlin will continue to have its own independent release cycles from that of Android or Android Studio. The projects remain completely independent. Obviously there will be close collaboration between the product team to make sure that Kotlin is always working correctly in Android Studio.They still have plans to support both of these system with Kotlin/Native and nothing has changed in this regard.
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