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Comment by cwyers | Hacker News Reader

A lot of this seems to be driven by Android developers who are locked into an older version of the JVM because of decisions Google has made. In other words, Kotlin is taking improvements from languages that target other environments (the CLR, native compilation or even newer versions of the JVM) and giving them to programmers who are stuck on a version of the JVM that isn't seeing any progress.

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Yes, Google has radio silence on adopting anything beyond Java 8.

And even for Java 8 you need a latest Oreo device, because not everything can be desugared into Java 6.

There is also the issue that going forward Java 9+ libraries won't be possible in Android.

So the only way forward appears to be indeed Kotlin and Kotlin specific libraries.

Probably has something to do with that ongoing lawsuit with oracle

Easily avoidable if Google had not screw Sun in first place, and if they bothered to buy it afterwards when Sun went bankrupt.

Apparently they thought they could get away with it.

And there are still lots of jars on Maven central that are unusable on Android Oreo.

Because even after switching to OpenJDK, they cherry pick APIs from there and ART does not support all JVM bytecode features.

I don't think it's that. They switched to OpenJDK a while ago.

It seems to be more that they don't prioritise keeping up with the Java ecosystem very much, they'd rather work on their own stuff. It's more a cultural issue than anything else IMO. Google has always had a big NIH problem.

Android doesn't use the JVM. They're slowly rolling in newer Java language features bit by bit though.

Switching languages only helps the syntax. If the Android Runtime can't do something it that means it can't do it in Java or Kotlin.

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