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Comment by tus88 | Hacker News Reader

Go was written for servers, Kotlin for mobile apps. Seems an obvious choice really.

> Go was written for servers, Kotlin for mobile apps.

Not really. Kotlin was just a better JVM language developed by the JetBrains folks before Google adopted it as a first class Android language, but I don't believe it was specifically developed for mobile initially.

The open question is if Java will start borrowing the best features from Kotlin and it will become less relevant (like Scala). To Kotlin's credit, it has better IDE support, it feels simpler than Java (whereas Scala feels more complex), and it cleans up a lot of fundamental language issues that Java can't get away from.

Kotlin is just a less verbose, more modern language targeting the JVM. It has nothing to do with mobile apps beyond that Google, much later, decided to support it for Android development.

Go is an efficient platform, however in these switches it usually goes something like "we took something hugely overbuilt, with layers and layers and layers and abstractions and abstractions, and rebuilt it with minimalist Go and now it's faster", which, of course it is.

I don't think that's true. You're confusing the fact that Kotlin has become the officially supported language for Android development with the idea that it was written for mobile apps.

You may be confusing the adoption of Kotlin for Android. That happened more recently Kotlin has been open source since 2012 and designed as a direct (compatible) replacement for Java.

I wouldn’t say that Kotlin was written for mobile apps. JetBrains, the company that created Kotlin, doesn’t even have mobile apps AFAIK. It’s just meant to be a more modern JVM language and that means it does anything Java does just better. Servers included.

The only thing I see where Golang wins over the JVM is overall memory usage for daemons.. As Khan is non-profit they want to save at any avenue.

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