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Kotlin can do it all??

ＭＯＨＡＮ👨🏻‍💻 — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 20:51:03 +0000

Hello Everyone, you all know that I like to share my opinion that Kotlin is a better programming language that everyone should try. And it is actually very useful for general purpose programming, Android development, backend and cross platform development etc.

But many improvements are going on to make Kotlin even more better. So let's talk about it here:

Kotlin will be having a new compiler called K2, that will improve overall performance and will have many improvements and it will be stable in Kotlin 2.0 .
Kotlin is targeting web assembly through it's new Kotlin/WASM compiler that is alpha state right now, that will help better interoperability with JS and web APIs as well as WASI APIs. See the Introductory Video.
Kotlin Multi-Platform(KMP) is stable and many Android frameworks and libraries are migrating or already have migrated to KMP.
Kotlin has a cross platform UI framework called Compose Multiplatform, which is already stable for Android(via Jetpack Compose) and Desktop, but Alpha support for iOS(as it's support has recently been announced) and Experimental support for Web as it will use Kotlin/WASM compiler instead of Kotlin/JS. Yet the Compose Multiplatform has a wonderful DSL for writing Declarative UIs. See how to Build an iOS and Android app using 100% Kotlin with Compose Multiplatform.
Kotlin Interactive Notebook available in IntelliJ IDEA ultimate, and Kotlin first frameworks and libraries such as KotlinDL, Kandy, KMath, Kotlin DataFrame, MultiK, Krangl, lets-plot, kravis etc, and Kotlin bindings for Apache spark, and interoperability with Java to use its frameworks, makes it a better language for data science and machine learning. See Introductory Video, Tutorial 1, Tutorial 2.

That's all I wanted to say. I hope you like this post. Please give your reactions to it. And if you have any suggestions please let me know.

See you all in my next post.
And happy Kotlin to you 😊.

Create any kind of app with Kotlin

ＭＯＨＡＮ👨🏻‍💻 — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 14:18:00 +0000

Links for different libraries/frameworks to build any kind of app using Kotlin:

KMM for building cross platform as well as native apps using code sharing. See Docs.
Jetpack Compose, UI framework for building android apps using kotlin DSL.
Compose Multiplatform UI framework for building Desktop and Web apps using Kotlin DSL, and it enables UI code sharing with android, web and desktop.
TornadoFX for developing desktop apps, it has DSLs for making UI.
Ktor, to easily make any server side apps using DSLs.
Kotlin/JS for writing frontend web apps using Kotlin. As Kotlin can compile to JS too.
Kotlin wrappers for JS.
Html DSL in Kotlin. See it on Github.
Kotlin-React, enjoy making React app using Kotlin. See Tutorial.
Kotlin/Native, as Kotlin can also compile to native binaries, that was primarily for building iOS apps but now it is supporting all other platforms.

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Advantages of Kotlin

ＭＯＨＡＮ👨🏻‍💻 — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 20:21:38 +0000

Easy to learn the basics.
Clean and Concise syntax.
Interoperable with Java(means each and every Java package or library or framework or API will work seamlessly with Kotlin), plus you might know how much big the Java ecosystem is.
Provides nullable and type safety(means you don't need to write a whole try-catch block for catching null pointer exception because it can be handled safely, and type casting is also much safer).
Strong type inference.
OOPS with added modern features.
Functional programming(FP) is at its best, it is used to write more concise, cleaner and better code, and if we mix OOP and FP in Kotlin, we can even make very amazing DSLs.
Excellent and extended Java standard library.
Coroutines(and structured concurrency).
Wide range of apps can be made like multiplatform mobile, android, desktop, full-stack web apps and much more.
Can also be compiled to JS and interop. with it, thus Kotlin uses existing JS APIs to make frontend web apps, there are plans that Kotlin will even work seamlessly with Node JS in future.
Most preferred language for Android development with first-class support by Google.
We can make Kotlin Multi-platform Mobile(KMM) applications that run natively on Android and iOS, by sharing common business logical code, leveraging existing APIs and keeping UI/UX native on each platform.
KMM is a SDK that can also be added to an existing Android app to make it cross-platform.
High speed UI development with Jetpack Compose(for Android) and Compose Multiplatform(for Web and Desktop).
Can be used for data science and visualization, and deep or machine learning.
Kernel for Kotlin can be added in the Jupyter notebook.
In Kotlin, even primitive types have their own classes, and you can even add your own methods to them using extension functions without doing any inheritance.
Kotlin is open-source and free to use, and there are many 3rd party libraries for Kotlin.
Kotlin can be added in any Java IDE(although, IntelliJ IDEA is most preferred for Kotlin).
Kotlin can be easily integrated and work parallelly with any existing Java ecosystem or project(s).
Kotlin can interop. with C and Obj-C for iOS and other native app development(s), as Kotlin can be compiled to native binaries using LLVM, also special WebAssembly support will be soon added in Kotlin.
Kotlin-Native and KMM plugin is available in Xcode IDE for making iOS apps using Kotlin.
Kotlin Coroutines are lightweight than Java Threads.
Kotlin Coroutines are multi-platform, means they can be used when you are targeting JVM or JS or Native platforms using Kotlin.
Kotlin can run as a script too(that eventually replaces the need of bash or groovy-gradle scripts).
Kotlin has a big, friendly and helpful community.
Kotlin is adopted by many major institutions and universities as a course in their academics.
Kotlin is also a suitable language for learning programming fundamentals and competitive programming.
Writing code with Kotlin might feel like it is a scripting language, but it is a statically typed programming language.

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