Evaluate usage of kotlin in the project

[maskaravivek]

Recently Google made Kotlin a first class language for Android. For the past 1-2 years, it has been getting a lot of traction. We should surely evaluate its usage in our project. Here's a very interesting take on it. @misaochan @tobias47n9e @neslihanturan

[whym]

It appears that Android Studio's support for Kotlin is still in pre-release. (although you can manually add the required plugin.)

[maskaravivek]

Yes still in pre-release. Can be used with the canary build of Studio.

[tobias47n9e]

I don't have any expertise with either language. I looked at the Koitlin article and it seems like it is a well designed language. I wouldn't have any issue with switching.

[misaochan]

Wow, interesting! I wonder if there are any stats on which other apps have converted to Kotlin (either partially or fully), and how it worked out for them?

[veyndan]

I second the use of Kotlin, I've been using it in a personal project for a couple of months and it is a pleasure to use. The Kotlin plugin has been stable for a few years now, the only difference is that Android Studio will finally provide it with the editor. There are also a lot of resources on Kotlin as it is very big in the developer community.

A major supporter of Kotlin are the guys at Square which is arguably the most influential team in Android development.

[whym]

Could it be used for writing tests here? Unit tests can use more readability and it appears like Kotlin can be of help, and doing something experimental there is safe (in the sense that it's separate from the main code).

Here is my attempt: whym@e9fb3d8

I like to be able to separate words in function names such as "@Test fun `strip nothing from non-localized string`()". It causes some warnings ("Identifier not allowed in Android projects"), though.

[developer--]

Kotlin? :)) awesome 👍

[whym]

Andrdoid Studio 3 has been officially released and I submitted #958.

[feelfreelinux]

Can we use Kotlin in new classes / modules? Using android-extensions allows us to stop using butterknife, and Kotlin is fully interoperable with java

[misaochan]

Can we use Kotlin in new classes / modules? Using android-extensions allows us to stop using butterknife, and Kotlin is fully interoperable with java

Personally I would be in support of limiting Kotlin to tests for the time being - there are lots of overhauls going on with the codebase at the moment, and adding Kotlin to the mix would make things rather messy IMO. Plus it would add another barrier to entry for new contributors.

In my opinion we could try it with tests for the next few months (I believe the recent PR to use Kotlin for writing tests was our first ever), and then see how it goes before making a decision on whether or not to start adding it to the main codebase.

[madhurgupta10]

@maskaravivek Sir, isn't is the right time to move to Kotlin from Java?

[psh]

@madhurgupta10 I would suggest looking through the code and creating some tests - help us to make a better evaluation of the language by demonstrating its usage.