[hiyou102]

I see the biggest market for Kotlin being Android. It manages to provide features that Java will likely never have while still having a fairly small impact on run time, deploy, and APK size. The conversion tool is really great too. It makes it much easier to migrate a project to kotlin, especially when trying to figure out more complex stuff like annotations. I see Kotlin being Android's Swift in the future.

[on_and_off]

I would love to see that happen (or something similar, like Swift).

I fear that it will be hard to move in that direction as long as Google does not push in that direction though.

The official word is that we don't need their support in order to write Android apps in Kotlin, which is true and that the gap between objC and Swift was large enough to justify the change but that Java is not that old, which is debatable.

In all cases, it is hard to argument the move to a new language in an existing codebase when there is no official push in that direction.

If I have to create a new app in the near future, I will strongly consider Kotlin, but for the 8 eight old codebase I have to deal with + the 15 engineers working on it, my hands are tied.

[izacus]

> In all cases, it is hard to argument the move to a new language in an existing codebase when there is no official push in that direction.

I don't understand the logic behind this sentence? Why do you need Google to push you somewhere instead of you youself choosing a more productive option?

Kotlin is designed to be easy to integrate into existing Java codebase and our introduction to a largeish Android codebase has been a great success.

[on_and_off]

For a personal project or for creating a new app from scratch where I am lead engineer, sure Kotlin would be an easy choice.

However, right now I am a senior engineer working on a 8 years old android app alongside 15 other Android devs.

The switch to another language is not even something that the current lead or the CTO are willing to consider.

In their defense, we would have to train the whole team, this would be a major task and build times are already a big issue so anything degrading them is hard to push for.

A push from Google would help a lot, it would remove a lot of objections like "this is hipster shit" or "I am not going to learn the language of the month" (coming from people who have not learned any language in years) and force them to take it seriously.

Even the iOS team barely use Swift though, so I don't see it in a near future. I guess I just have to search for another company.

> our introduction to a largeish Android codebase has been a great success. Do you mind sharing some details ?