Effectiveness of Kotlin vs. Java in android app development tasks

摘要

Context: Kotlin is a new programming language representing an alternative to Java; they both target the same JVM and can safely coexist in the same application. Kotlin is advertised as capable to solve several known limitations of Java. Recent surveys show that Kotlin achieved a relevant diffusion among Java developers. Goal: We planned to empirically assess a few typical promises of Kotlin w.r.t. known Java's limitations, in terms of development effectiveness, maintainability, and ease of development. Method: Our experiment involved 27 teams of 4 people each that completed a set of maintenance tasks (both defect correction and feature addition) on Android apps written in either Java or Kotlin. In addition to the number of fixed defects, effort, and code size, we collected, though a questionnaire, the participants' perceptions about the avoidance of known pitfalls. Results: We did not observe any significant difference in terms of maintainability between the two languages. We found a significant difference regarding the amount of code written, which constitutes evidence of better conciseness of Kotlin. Concerning ease of development, the frequency of NullPointerExceptions reported by the subjects was significantly lower when developing in Kotlin. On the other hand, no significant difference was found in the occurrence of other common Java pitfalls. Finally, the IDE support was deemed better for Java than Kotlin. Conclusions: Some of the promises of Kotlin to be a "better Java" have been confirmed by our empirical assessment. Evidence suggests that the effort in transitioning to Kotlin can provide some advantages to Java developers, especially regarding code conciseness. Our results may serve as the basis for further investigations on the properties of the language.