Dart vs Java vs Kotlin

Overview

Java

Stacks148.0K

Followers105.5K

Votes3.7K

Dart

Stacks4.3K

Followers3.8K

Votes452

Kotlin

Stacks17.7K

Followers11.9K

Votes650

GitHub Stars51.5K

Forks6.1K

Dart vs Java vs Kotlin: What are the differences?

Differences between Dart, Java, and Kotlin

1. Strong Typing: Dart and Kotlin are both statically typed languages, while Java is dynamically typed. This means that Dart and Kotlin perform type checking during compile-time, which helps in catching errors early in the development process. In contrast, Java performs type checking at runtime, which can lead to errors being discovered only during the execution of the program.

2. Null Safety: Dart and Kotlin have built-in null safety features, while Java does not. Dart and Kotlin provide explicit syntax for handling nullable and non-nullable types, reducing the chances of null pointer exceptions. On the other hand, Java does not enforce null safety, requiring developers to manually check for null values, which can lead to runtime errors.

3. Language Purpose: Dart is primarily designed for building mobile, web, and server apps, while Java is focused on building standalone applications, web servers, and Android apps. Kotlin, on the other hand, is a general-purpose language that supports both server-side and client-side development, making it suitable for a wide range of applications.

4. Interoperability: Java is known for its strong interoperability with other programming languages and platforms. It can seamlessly integrate with existing Java code and libraries. Dart and Kotlin also support interoperability but to a lesser extent. Kotlin can interoperate with Java code, while Dart can interoperate with JavaScript code.

5. Syntax and Code Conciseness: Kotlin and Dart are known for their concise and expressive syntax compared to Java. Both Kotlin and Dart provide syntax features like type inference, lambda expressions, and extension functions, reducing the boilerplate code and making the code more readable and maintainable.

6. Development Ecosystem: Java has a mature and well-established development ecosystem with a vast number of libraries, frameworks, and tools available. Kotlin, being interoperable with Java, can leverage this ecosystem. Dart, on the other hand, has a growing ecosystem but is not as extensive as Java's.

In summary, Dart and Kotlin offer advantages like strong typing, null safety, and concise syntax compared to Java. Dart is focused on mobile, web, and server apps, while Kotlin is a general-purpose language. Java, with its strong interoperability and mature ecosystem, is well-suited for building standalone applications and Android apps.

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Advice on Java, Dart, Kotlin

Erik

Chief Architect at LiveTiles

May 18, 2020

Decided

C# and .Net were obvious choices for us at LiveTiles given our investment in the Microsoft ecosystem. It enabled us to harness of the .Net framework to build ASP.Net MVC, WebAPI, and Serverless applications very easily. Coupled with the high productivity of Visual Studio, it's the native tongue of Microsoft technology.

614k views614k

Comments

Ido

Mar 6, 2020

Decided

When developing a new blockchain, we as a team chose Go lang over Java and other candidates, due to Go being (a) natively suited to concurrency - there are primitives in the language itself (goroutines, channels) that really help with reasoning about concurrency (b) super fast - build time, running, testing are all much faster that Java, this gives a far superior developer experience (c) shorter and stricter than Java - code is much shorter (less verbose), and there is usually one good way to do things, and even the code formatter that is bundled with Go is very opinionated - over a short time this makes reading other people's code far smoother than having to deal with different styles.

You should be aware that Go presently (v1.13) lacks Generics.

267k views267k

Comments

Brent

CEO at DEFY Labs

Mar 7, 2020

Decided

Node.js has been growing in popularity, and the ability to access the global pool of Javascript developers is great. There is a decreased amount of effort for people to work across the frontend and backend, and the language itself is easy and works well for many common use cases.

Go was the other serious candidate, but it just hasn't been implemented in as many Production systems yet, and the best Go engineers I've known have been hackers, whereas we're building a robust analytics platform that requires more caution. Type safety is easily added with TypeScript, and NPM is awesomely handy.

369k views369k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Java	Dart	Kotlin
Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!	Dart is a cohesive, scalable platform for building apps that run on the web (where you can use Polymer) or on servers (such as with Google Cloud Platform). Use the Dart language, libraries, and tools to write anything from simple scripts to full-featured apps.	Kotlin is a statically typed programming language for the JVM, Android and the browser, 100% interoperable with Java
-	Dart’s comprehensive libraries give you lots of choices;Compilation to JavaScript lets you deploy Dart apps now;Pub package manager;Dev Server	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 51.5K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 6.1K
Stacks 148.0K	Stacks 4.3K	Stacks 17.7K
Followers 105.5K	Followers 3.8K	Followers 11.9K
Votes 3.7K	Votes 452	Votes 650
Pros & Cons
Pros 608 Great libraries 446 Widely used 401 Excellent tooling 396 Huge amount of documentation available 334 Large pool of developers available Cons 33 Verbosity 27 NullpointerException 17 Nightmare to Write 16 Overcomplexity is praised in community culture 12 Boiler plate code	Pros 60 Backed by Google 54 Flutter 39 Twice the speed of Javascript 35 Great tools 30 Scalable Cons 3 Locked in - JS or TS interop is very hard to accomplish 3 Lack of ORM 0 A	Pros 73 Interoperable with Java 55 Functional Programming support 51 Null Safety 46 Official Android support 44 Backed by JetBrains Cons 7 Java interop makes users write Java in Kotlin 4 Frequent use of {} keys 2 Nonullpointer Exception 2 Hard to make teams adopt the Kotlin style 1 Slow compiler
Integrations
Spring	No integrations available	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Java, Dart, Kotlin?

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

Swift

Writing code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and apps run lightning-fast. Swift is ready for your next iOS and OS X project — or for addition into your current app — because Swift code works side-by-side with Objective-C.

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Dart vs Java vs Kotlin: What are the differences?

Differences between Dart, Java, and Kotlin

Dart vs Java vs Kotlin

Overview

Dart vs Java vs Kotlin: What are the differences?