Apple && Android (Ying to my Yang)
The most common question regarding smartphones is which team are you, iPhone or Android? Team iPhone 11… or team Google Pixel 4, Samsung Note10, OnePlus 7T Pro, and LG V50 ThinQ? Team “blue” bubble and exclusivity or team “green” bubble (speaking from an iPhone perspective) and inclusivity? Regardless of which team you sweat blood and cry tears for we all share one thing in common and that’s our use of apps on these devices!
But wait, if I’m enjoying apps on both platforms that are identical to each other which language(s) is responsible for this?! Is it just Javascript? What about C or C++? It’s gotta be Java or Python then. Well, the short answer is all of them. Theoretically speaking, all these languages are applicable. Apps have been and will continue to be built using languages suitable to that app. Backends and Frontends of most apps blend the use of JavaScript, Objective-C, C++, so forth and so on.. Until now.
Swift and Kotlin, introduced in 2013 and 2017 respectively, were developed by two of the leading forces in the tech industry, Apple and Google. If you’re familiar with Apple and products like the iPhone, Apple Watch, and Mac and companies likes Samsung and Google then you should get familiar with some of the languages behind them. Swift was created to give developers more support and dynamism for Apple related apps and speed up compiling as opposed to Objective-C and Python.
Better performance
equals better apps.
Swift apps more than live up to the name. For instance, a common search algorithm completes much faster using Swift.
Up to2.6X faster than Objective-C
Up to8.4X faster than Python 2.7
10,000 integers found in a graph
using depth-first search algorithm*
Kotlin technically has been around since 2011 when a few developers in Saint Petersburg, Russia created it in response to not many languages having the features or compilation speed they need. In 2017, Google gave it first-class support in Android and that’s when Kotlin took off. Kotlin added to the Android library of languages features that Java or C++ didn’t support.
Some Java issues addressed in Kotlin
Kotlin fixes a series of issues that Java suffers from:
- Null references are controlled by the type system.
- No raw types
- Arrays in Kotlin are invariant
- Kotlin has proper function types, as opposed to Java’s SAM-conversions
- Use-site variance without wildcards
- Kotlin does not have checked exceptions
Since inception, both Swift and Kotlin have been the general-purpose programming languages most developers rely on for iOS and Android based app development and offer similar syntax leading many in the tech world to call Kotlin a mere copycat of Swift!
They do have some differences:
Regardless of the argument one thing we all can agree on as developers is the staying power of both languages. The ability for Kotlin to be interoperable with Java or any Objective-C language makes it enjoyable to add to existing and future code. Swift has been widely used by the likes of Lyft, Eventbrite, and LinkedIn with other start ups following the trend. If you’re lucky enough to work on a project that implements Swift or Kotlin take advantage of the robustness..ness? and be a master of code!
