Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pjmlp 815 days ago
Android OS layer has zero Kotlin, and Google had to backtrack on their decision to let Java languish, as the Android ecosystem started to lose out on Java ecosystem, thus ART is now updatable via Play Store since Android 12, and Java 17 LTS is the latest supported version.

Kotlin is only used on Jetpack Compose and a couple of AndroidX libraries, that you have to ship alongside the application. And as alternative to Groovy on Gradle build scripts.

I expect this year's GDC to announce Java 21 LTS support.
1 comments
jsnelgro 815 days ago
Interesting, I don't develop for Android so I don't know the details in this space. Surprising to learn that the Android OS layer is 100% Java. In terms of a platform, I was more referring to the mass adoption of Kotlin for Android app development. 95% of the top 1,000 Android apps are written in Kotlin and adoption overall is > 50% according to their overview page https://kotlinlang.org/docs/android-overview.html

IMO those numbers create a lot of staying power for the language.

link
pjmlp 815 days ago
> Android OS layer is 100% Java

More like 70%, the remaining 30% are split between Linux kernel (C), Treble drivers written in C++ (Java is also supported), SQLlite (C), and naturally Skia, ART are written in C++. With a couple of newer drivers like the Bluetooth stack, adopting Rust.

However zero Kotlin.

Naturally Kotlin has such an adoption on userspace, Jetpack Compose the new UI framework is written in Kotlin, so already adopting that jumps up the adotption numbers.

It is like measuring Swift adoption by the use of SwiftUI, even if the business logic is still written in Objective-C.

I do agree that Google being Kotlin's godfather, pushing it for new projects, does create a lot of staying power.

However it is also the reason why on JVM, it is only yet another guest language, as there is no one telling Java developers they should not write Java to use framework XYZ.

All those that tried, Grails, Spark, Akka,... eventually lose adoption speed, and got replaced by Java alternatives.

Which Google had to accept, Kotlin's value without the breath of Java written libraries isn't that great any longer, and they aren't going to rewrite the whole Maven Central into Kotlin, as the Java community moves beyond Java 8.

link