Comment by galaxyLogic

4 years ago

I would add Kotlin to Google's credit.

But I think it's important to note that these companies don't contribute to open source out of any moral obligation, do they?

I think they do it to tie more developers and development around their eco-systems and products.

Maybe Amazon should get smart and start doing something similar. Or maybe they don't need that. But in any case I don't hold it morally against them that they don't. I think a bigger issue is it seems they pay and have been paying very little or no taxes.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/amazon-had-to-pay-federal-in...

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galaxyLogic

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reducesuffering  4 years ago

No I would not add Kotlin to Google's credit. All the initial work and exponential adoption started with JetBrains. Google only greenlit it as an official Android dev language eventually (barring whatever OSS work they're doing on it only now).

  • pjmlp  4 years ago

    Google is surely pumping lots of money into Kotlin, had it not been for them, and Kotlin would just be yet another runner up in the long list of JVM guest languages.

    It is also due to Android Studio performance issues that Kotlin compiler improvements came to be, and also the compiler plugins for stuff like kapt and Jetpack Composer.

    Android Java might be stagnant, not kept up to date with standard Java, yet it still rules in Studio tooling performance.