Kotlin allows for dropping explicit types (as does Java 11), and together with the standard library, which is based on the functional style mentioned above, it shortens many repetitive loops into simpler statements.

Shorter code: Kotlin’s modern design makes its code shorter.

Meta’s home-brewed Redex minimizes these issues, but they still exist, making Kotlin a better alternative. Although Java 8 adds support for lambdas and is available for Android, it comes at the cost of more anonymous objects, which affect performance negatively on low-end Android devices.

Functional programming: Kotlin’s support for inline functions and lambda expressions allows us to use a functional programming style without compromising execution speed.But even with that, Kotlin’s built-in nullability handling is more robust and easier to work with. We use internal tools to detect null safety issues earlier, and we rigorously annotate our code as part of our work to detect such issues in Java earlier. We are very good at fixing them before releasing our apps, but dealing with those issues is still time-consuming. Nullability: Null pointer exceptions are a common problem at Meta, as everywhere else.We also compared the latest Kotlin version with Java 11, which is the latest version that can be used for Android development.Īside from its popularity, Kotlin holds some major advantages: Kotlin is generally regarded as a better language than Java, with higher favorability ratings than Java in the yearly Stack Overflow developer survey. Why we’re converting our codebase to Kotlin Shifting away from Java, which we currently use for Android development, and over to Kotlin is not a trivial task. Meta’s Android repository is very large and reaches across our family of apps and technologies, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Portal, and the Quest. So it only makes sense that we would shift our Android development at Meta to Kotlin as we work to make our development workflows more efficient. In recent years, Kotlin has become a popular language for Android development. We’re open sourcing various examples and utilities we used to manipulate Kotlin code as part of this migration.As of today, our Android codebase contains over 10 million lines of Kotlin code.Kotlin is a popular language for Android development and offers some key advantages over Java.We’re sharing lessons learned from shifting our Android development from Java to Kotlin.

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