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Comment by higherpurpose | Hacker News Reader

> Dave Cheney pointed out on Reddit that he is under the impression that Go is popular in China for its usefulness in writing programs for rooted Android phones.

Interesting. It seems Go really is preferred to Java, if given the choice. I hope Google seriously considers making Go the main programming language for Android in the next few years. Other than having to rewrite all the old and new APIs (in parallel with the new releases) I assume it shouldn't cause too many backwards compatibility issues now that they made apps compile to the platform natively anyway, which I think should allow to rip out Java, once 95+ percent of the Android users are on Android 5 or later.

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>Go 1.4 is released [0]

>10 December 2014

>Today we announce Go 1.4, the fifth major stable release of Go...

>The most notable new feature in this release is official support for Android. Using the support in the core and the libraries in the golang.org/x/mobile repository, it is now possible to write simple Android apps using only Go code. At this stage, the support libraries are _still nascent_ and _under heavy development_. Early adopters should expect a bumpy ride, but we welcome the community to get involved.

Emphasis mine.

I really don't think a beta feature that was released a month ago could have affected the statistics.

[0] https://blog.golang.org/go1.4

Well, they do make the hardware over there -- maybe they're pretty comfortable with beta software.

And besides, there was already some Android integration even before Google announced it.

That is no different than the limited NDK support for C and C++.

Check the video from Google IO 2014, Android Developers Fireside, about their opinion on alternatives to Java on Android.

If you graduate from university and work in a real company you will see that APIs, especially if given to customers, are nearly impossible to kill. You can change them a little, but you can't get rid of them, ever. I bet there is even still a significant Android 2.3 community in China as well (as I guess in most other second/third world countries). If you don't replace Android, you won't replace the Java. And even then Android will be hard thread to your new project.

> It seems Go really is preferred to Java

You can only write all but trivial apps in Go on Android, it's very doubtful that Go is preferred to Java.

google is working on a new compiler for android http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/jackandjill that will convert java code into dex. I don't see Go replacing Java for android anytime soon, if they had plans they would probably not invest in this new toolchain.

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