“We have a plan to expand beyond that,” he said. But Ward explained that the two companies are looking to expand the foundation with new members. These will allow developers to pass parameters to a function to, for example, only write some of the code and values for connecting to a database once and then use this same context again every time you need to make that connection again.Īs for the Kotlin Foundation, it’s worth noting that until now, only Google and JetBrains were members here and the two companies used the foundation to coordinate their investments into Kotlin. “Once we ship the new compiler and everyone gets on to it, then we’ll be able to then invest more into new language features.”Īmong those new features are context receivers, which are currently still behind a flag.

“We’ve intentionally kind of slowed down the rate of change in the language because we’ve got the two compilers going in parallel,” Ward said. There are now a handful of Android libraries that are written in Kotlin, but that’s obviously still only a small part of the overall platform.

And despite all of the focus on Kotlin, it’s worth noting that the core of the Android platform and its APIs are still built on Java. Because of Kotlin’s interoperability with Java, developers can mix and match libraries, but to get all of the benefits of Kotlin, developers have to stay within the Kotlin ecosystem. We’re not quite there yet, though, in part because the Java ecosystem is so big that it still has a lot of gravity. The interoperability of Kotlin with Java has made it that people can kind of progressively move code bases over and it would be great to get to the point down the road, where just everything is all Kotlin.” We know that they’re more productive, the quality of applications is higher and so getting more of those people to move more of their code over has been a focus for us. “We know that developers are generally more satisfied with Kotlin than with Java. “There is still quite a bit of Java still happening on Android,” Ward said.

It’s no surprise that Google’s hope is that over time, all Android developers will switch over to Kotlin. Google makes Kotlin a first-class language for writing Android apps

Java to kotlin