Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen Coje_He for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com, October 29, Facebook's parent company Meta revealed that the language it uses to develop Android applications has moved from Java to Kotlin, a younger programming language that also relies on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

Kotlin, founded by software tool maker JetBrains, made its debut in 2011 and launched version 1.0 in 2016. The following year, Kotlin was adopted by Google as the first (supported) language developed by Android and placed under its own foundation, funded by JetBrains and Google.

Before that, most Android apps were written in Java. In May 2019, at its developer conference, Google began encouraging Android developers to favor Kotlin over Java. At the end of the year, Google said 60 per cent of the top 1000 Android apps contained Kotlin code.

CTOnews.com learned that the reason Google recommends Kotlin is that it is simpler, more secure, supports structured concurrency, makes asynchronous code easier, and interoperates with Java. But it may also have something to do with Java manager Oracle, which spent more than a decade filing infringement claims against Google for Java API used in Android.

Meta also seems to be interested in Kotlin, and Facebook software engineer Omer Strulovich says they are already replacing Java code in several of its popular Android applications with Kotlin, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Portal and Quest.

"Kotlin is generally considered to be a better language than Java, and Kotlin has a higher rating than Java in the annual survey of Stack Overflow developers," Strulovich said, noting that Kotlin has become a popular language for Android development. "therefore, it is reasonable for us to shift Meta's Android development to Kotlin."

But in addition to its popularity in the Android ecosystem, Strulovich acknowledges that it is still far less popular in the broader market than Java,Java is the second or third most popular language in the world.

Kotlin's advantages over Java include built-in nullability handling, support for inline functions and lambda expressions, shorter code, and the ability to define DSL (Domain-specific language). The disadvantage is that it takes a long time to face a mixed code base, which is more difficult to maintain, and Kotlin exists for a shorter time than Java, and has an immature set of tools.

"Today, our Android apps for Facebook, Messenger and Instagram all have more than 1 million lines of Kotlin code, and the conversion rate is increasing," Strulovich said. "We have a total of more than 1000 lines of Kotlin code in our Android code base."

Strulovich didn't say when Meta started this shift, nor did it say what percentage of its Android application code was converted.

Strulovich added: "on average, we have seen an 11% reduction in the number of lines of code in this migration. And there has been no performance setback, so at least the converted applications have maintained their original performance."

Strulovich said the migration of Meta is ongoing and accelerating, but he added: "Kotlin still lacks some of the tools and optimizations that we are used to working with Java. But we are working to close these gaps. As we make progress and these tools and libraries mature, we will also try to put them back to the community."

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