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My question is why Xtrend instead of Kotlin or Scala? Both languages have good reasons to recommend them and both already support Android today.

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Mentioned in the article; many JVM languages have substantial performance issues under Dalvik. Scala certainly does; not sure about Kotlin.

Is this actually true for Scala? I was under the impression that statically typed languages run basically the same as Java on Android. Granted it has some other issues (such as running in to limits on the number of classes).

> Scala certainly does; not sure about Kotlin.

How did you measure that?

Because Xtend compiles to plain Java code that is, mostly, readable. So the investmet in Xtend is low: in case it fails, you can compile your codebase into Java and continue from there.

Basically, it is very similar to what CoffeeScript does. A better syntax with (largely) same semantics. Which can have massive advantages.

I'm not sure this answers the question or even explains why Xtend is better than say, RetroLambda. It sounds like lambda support is already being backported from Java 8 by the Android team and since you can use lambdas today, any investment in Xtend is questionable.

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