At this point, I feel no language can compensate for the platform's out-of-date java libraries. I think Google has its priorities wrong: first should be recent java, second should be kotlin.
the problem with Android is the god awful API, not Java<p>this says it all: <a href="https://cdn1.hubspot.net/hubfs/2564010/The%20activity%20and%20fragment%20lifecycles%20(1).png" rel="nofollow">https://cdn1.hubspot.net/hubfs/2564010/The%20activity%20and%...</a><p>and it gets worse with every release
When will we have a proper LSP implementation for Kotlin that is maintained not by a single person but a full blown team?<p>JetBrains is very short-sighted about this[1], putting their own IDE-s success over the success of Kotlin: not healthy for the language if you ask me.<p>A lot of developers using Kotlin are also gaslighting everyone who doesn't want to use IntelliJ for Kotlin as if using the editor of your choosing is some sort of madness.<p>Kotlin needs to be a foundation, it clearly has a big community to drive the language and its accompanying tooling and integrations. Kotlin needs to be completely decoupled from JetBrains to succeed outside the JVM/java legacy areas.<p>[1]<a href="https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/any-plan-for-supporting-language-server-protocol/2471" rel="nofollow">https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/any-plan-for-supporting-lan...</a>
I’m a bit surprised Google hasn’t bought JetBrains. I bet they could get it for something like $2bn, which seems like an entirely reasonable price to pay to help improve the Android ecosystem.<p>On the flip side, Apple could buy JetBrains and seriously mess with Google, although that acquisition wouldn’t really make as much strategic sense.
All of this is flowing in from the ongoing #KotlinConf<p>Jetpack Compose - a react like paradigm to build apps - is the future of android app development. And I could not be more excited.<p>Kotlin Multiplatform is on track (<a href="https://twitter.com/zsmb13/status/1202507590674112513" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/zsmb13/status/1202507590674112513</a>) and will let ios apps be built using android studio without a Mac.<p>Kotlin 1.4 is touting upto 3x compiler improvements.<p>The question here is about the future of Flutter. Why do Flutter/Dart when Android is officially throwing its weight behind Kotlin and Compose is going to be every bit as react-y as Flutter or SwiftUI.
I read Jetpack Compose will be able to support multiplatform as well. It will be a kind of flutter possible with Kotlin.<p>Well, it’s no surprise that google can run multiple projects that solves more or less the same thing.
I hold no grudge against Kotlin as the language. But underlying platform ... I'd rather prefer for them to switch to some native thing. It is really depressing to compare situations when I could whip up high performance small native GUI application and that atrocious monstrosity called Android studio produces regurgitates fat resource hogs.
Truth is Kotlin and Swift are just a form of developer lock-in. A webapp written in React inside of a chromium webview is fast enough for most apps use cases. (NO REACT NATIVE PLEASE)
The fact that Javascript is improved by many parties made the tooling and the performance of Chromium very fast.
Babel+Webpack are years ahead of the build systems for both Android and iOS.
Sublime and Atom are much leaner and better for coding than Android Studio and Xcode.
The main problem with java is oracle though which lobby patent trolls its way towards almost zero progress for java in the past 10 years. Sure they release java 13 now but compared with the feature-set of Kotlin and swift it's rather pathetic. Especially considering the planned price model of java 9+.