Java Vs. Kotlin: Head to Head Comparison
Promo
Coming to choose a development language now is not an easy task. There are plenty of options, each better at some aspect. Here we’ll focus on Java and Kotlin.
Kotlin is a JVM language. You can do in Kotlin pretty much anything you can do in Java. It’s a great language for backend services, not only Android, as many mistakenly think.
As the younger one, Kotlin added many shortcuts and improvements that make it easier and faster to develop. It has very good documentation, so the ramp-up is fast, especially for Java developers.
Java, however, is not left behind. It keeps adding many features, and each new release contains enhancements and new options. And although Kotlin’s community is growing, it is still far from being as large as Java’s community and ecosystem.
One Thing to Notice When Comparing Programming Languages
When reading a “vs” post, you must ask — which versions are we comparing?
Programming languages change all the time (hopefully!), and a comparison that was relevant to Java 8 may not be accurate for Java 14 or even 10.
Here, we’ll be comparing Java 15 and Kotlin 1.4.
For Java features that were added after version 7, the table includes the version they were added in — when they were first available as a feature, not finalized (for example, Records were introduced at Java 14 and finalized at Java 16).
So, What’s the Difference?
In the table below, I tried to gather the major differences between the two languages.
History in a Sentence
Java was first released in 1996. Kotlin in 2016, 20 years later.
Java was created at Sun Microsystems. Kotlin by JetBrains, the developer of IntelliJ IDEA (so you don’t have to worry about an IDE for Kotlin).
Kotlin has a JVM compiler that produces Java Bytecode (class files), so at the bottom line, it’s very similar to Java (Kotlin also has JavaScript and native binaries compilers, but that’s for a different post).
You Don’t Have to Choose One!
Kotlin works well with Java.
I’m not sure combining few programming languages in the same service is the most readable option, but hey, you can enjoy both worlds.
Conclusion
Currently, Kotlin is the more concise, more functional, easy-to-develop-in language. It has some very cool features that are not (yet?) available by Java.
Still, Java keeps adding, improving, and moving forward.
It’s intriguing to see how this table will look a year from now.
