Google announced Android is gaining official support for the Kotlin programming language, in addition to Java and C++. The news received the biggest applause from the audience so far. You can download the Kotlin plugin today for Android Studio.
Google describes Kotlin, which is an open sourced project under the Apache 2.0 license, as “a brilliantly designed, mature language that we believe will make Android development faster and more fun.”
Developers will be happy to know that Kotlin’s compiler emits Java byte-code. Kotlin can call Java, and Java can call Kotlin. Indeed, “the effortless interoperation between the two languages” was a large part of Kotlin’s appeal to the Android team.
This means you can add as little or as much Kotlin into your existing codebase as you want, mixing the two languages freely within the same project. Calling out to Kotlin code from Java code should just work, while calling to Java code requires some automatically applied translation conventions.
