Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is migrating from Java code to the Kotlin language for its Android applications, in line with Google’s strategy. Kotlin is a younger programming language that is also based on the Java Virtual Machine (or JVM).
Kotlin was created by the software tool maker JetBrains. It hit the market in 2011 and it was not until 2016 that its version 1.0 was released. In 2017 it was adopted by Google as a compatible language for Android development and put under the management of its own foundation, funded by JetBrains and Google.
These have carried out initiatives little by little to expand the use and knowledge of Kotlin between developers and companies.
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What does Kotlin have that Java doesn’t?
Google’s justification for using Kotlin is that it’s more concise, more secure, supports structured concurrency to make asynchronous code easier and is interoperable with Java.
Facebook software engineer Omer Strulovich has explained that the social advertising business, which is in the process of becoming a large Virtual Reality company around the metaverse, has been replacing Java code in several of its popular Android apps on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Portal and Quest, by Kotlin.
Strulovich has also had good words for the programming language: “Kotlin is generally considered a better language than Javawith higher favorability rates than Java in the annual Stack Overflow developer survey” and values that if Google is the reference language in the development of Android apps, “it makes sense that we change our Android development in Meta to Kotlin “.
In addition to the fact that the Android ecosystem has adopted Kotlin, this programming language has other advantages that developers appreciate and that Meta has highlighted in an official statement. Its nullability, which helps prevent null reference errors by supporting types that cannot have a null value; support for functional programming through inline functions and lambda expressions; and support for Domain Specific Languages (DSL), among other things.
Strulovich hasn’t said when Meta started this transition (although there was a lot of talk about this programming language at last year’s developer conference). It is also not known what percentage of his Android app code has been converted so far.