Meta begins to migrate its code to kotlin

 

Meta begins to migrate its code to kotlin

The Meta company, which has as its products the social networks facebook, whatsapp, instagram, and others, has decided to migrate its applications for android from Java code to kotlin code, in order not to remain stagnant and adapt to new technologies.

Kotlin is a younger programming language than Java, which is also based on the Java virtual machine (or JVM). Google adopted it in 2018 as a compatible language for android development and put it under the management of its own foundation, funded by jetbrains and Google.

The kotlin language is more concise than Java; it is estimated that with this language, lines of code are reduced by 40% compared to Java. Kotlin provides several advanced functions, such as operator overloading, lambda expressions, string templates, etc. In addition to this kotlin is less prone to errors because it is a static type programming language, which allows you to detect errors at compile time.

Facebook software engineer Omer Strulovich explained that the social advertising business, which is in the process of becoming a large virtual reality company with the "metaverse ", has been replacing Java code in several of its popular android applications with kotlin, because kotlin is highly interoperable with Java, there is not much difficulty using kotlin in a Java project. Strulovich has also had good words for the programming language: "kotlin is generally regarded as a better language than Java, with favorability ratings higher than Java in the annual stack overflow developer survey" and assesses that if it is a benchmark language for Google in developing apps for android, "it makes sense that we change our android development target to kotlin ".