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dothething | 11 years ago

Why Kotlin over Groovy? Because it's statically typed? Is this an evolutionary thing, or just preference?

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vorg|11 years ago

Kotlin's for building large software systems using the tightly-integrated IntelliJ plugin, both from Jetbrains. It was built with that use case firmly in mind, and even had contributions from James Strachan (Groovy's creator) and Alex Tkachman (creator of Groovy 2.0's, ummm..., inspiration Groovy++).

Groovy's for gluing together Java and JVM apps, testing Java objects, scripting for Grails, 20-line Gradle build scripts, and what not, anything that doesn't scale.

virtualwhys|11 years ago

What large software systems have been written in Kotlin? I was under the impression that until at least v1.0 (sometime next year?) there is no guarantee of API stability (i.e. there have been and will be breaking changes).

Perhaps Kotlin will be for building large software systems is a bit more accurate.

As for Groovy, Grails performs surprisingly well[1] with Groovy as the primary language (i.e. that the developer uses to create controllers, models, etc.). Would have expected it to fall on its face with a dynamic language in use, but no, hangs in there right around the middle of the pack.

[1] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r9&hw=pe...

sadris|11 years ago

umm... massively better performance?

olavgg|11 years ago

Groovy isn't slow. My guess is that the performance is quite similar, where Kotlin is faster in some cases and Groovy is faster in some other cases.