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  5. ES6 vs Kotlin

ES6 vs Kotlin

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Kotlin
Kotlin
Stacks17.7K
Followers11.9K
Votes650
GitHub Stars51.5K
Forks6.1K
ES6
ES6
Stacks72.5K
Followers60.9K
Votes167

ES6 vs Kotlin: What are the differences?

Key Differences between ES6 and Kotlin

  1. Language Background: ES6, also known as ECMAScript 2015, is a scripting language primarily used for client-side web development. On the other hand, Kotlin is a statically-typed programming language developed by JetBrains for modern multi-platform applications.

  2. Syntax and Conciseness: ES6 uses a more verbose syntax compared to Kotlin, which offers a more concise and clean syntax. Kotlin incorporates features like type interface, extension functions, and smart casts that reduce boilerplate code.

  3. Null Safety: Kotlin has a built-in null safety feature, meaning variables cannot hold null values unless explicitly defined as nullable. In contrast, ES6 does not have built-in null safety mechanisms, which can lead to potential null reference errors at runtime.

  4. Coroutines and Asynchronous Programming: Kotlin natively supports coroutines for handling asynchronous tasks, offering a more structured and efficient way of managing concurrency. ES6, on the other hand, relies on callbacks, promises, or external libraries for asynchronous programming.

  5. Platform Independence: Kotlin is designed to be a multi-platform language, capable of targeting different platforms such as JVM, Android, JavaScript, and native. ES6, being primarily used for web development, lacks the versatility to target such a wide range of platforms without additional tooling or transpilation.

  6. Type System: Kotlin has a powerful static type system with built-in type inference capabilities, aiding developers in catching type-related errors at compile time. In contrast, ES6 is more flexible with its dynamic typing approach, allowing for rapid prototyping and development but potentially leading to runtime errors due to type mismatches.

In Summary, Kotlin and ES6 differ in their language backgrounds, syntax conciseness, null safety, asynchronous programming models, platform independence, and type systems.

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Advice on Kotlin, ES6

Nick
Nick

Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream

Sep 5, 2019

Review

I work at Stream and I'm immensely proud of what our team is working on here at the company. Most recently, we announced our Android SDK accompanied by an extensive tutorial for Java and Kotlin. The tutorial covers just about everything you need to know when it comes to using our Android SDK for Stream Chat. The Android SDK touches many features offered by Stream Chat – more specifically, typing status, read state, file uploads, threads, reactions, editing messages, and commands. Head over to https://getstream.io/tutorials/android-chat/ and give it a whirl!

176k views176k
Comments
Zuriel
Zuriel

Jun 7, 2020

Needs advice

Can anyone help me decide what's best for app development or even android Oreo development? I'm in a state dilemma at the moment. I want to do Android programming, not necessarily web development. I have heard a lot of people recommend one of these, and it seems that both the tools can do the job. Which language would you choose?

291k views291k
Comments
Amir
Amir

Feb 7, 2020

Review

This post is a bit of an obvious one, as we have a web application, we obviously need to have HTML and CSS in our stack. Though specifically though, we can talk a bit about backward compatibility and the specific approaches we want to enforce in our codebase.

HTML : Not much explanation here, you have to interact with HTML for a web app. We will stick to the latest standard: HTML 5.

CSS: Again if we want to style any of our components within he web, we have to use to style it. Though we will be taking advantage of JSS in our code base and try to minimize the # of CSS stylesheets and include all our styling within the components themselves. This leaves the codebase much cleaner and makes it easier to find styles!

Babel: We understand that not every browser is able to support the cool new features of the latest node/JS features (such as redue, filter, etc) seen in ES6. We will make sure to have the correct Babel configuration o make our application backward compatible.

Material UI (MUI): We need to make our user interface as intuitive and pretty as possible within his MVP, and the UI framework used by Google will provide us with exactly that. MUI provides pretty much all the UI components you would need and allows heavy customization as well. Its vast # of demos will allow us to add components quickly and not get too hung up on making UI components.

We will be using the latest version of create-react-app which bundles most of the above along many necessary frameworks (e.g. Jest for testing) to get started quickly.

128k views128k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Kotlin
Kotlin
ES6
ES6

Kotlin is a statically typed programming language for the JVM, Android and the browser, 100% interoperable with Java

Goals for ECMAScript 2015 include providing better support for large applications, library creation, and for use of ECMAScript as a compilation target for other languages. Some of its major enhancements include modules, class declarations, lexical block scoping, iterators and generators, promises for asynchronous programming, destructuring patterns, and proper tail calls.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
51.5K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
6.1K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
17.7K
Stacks
72.5K
Followers
11.9K
Followers
60.9K
Votes
650
Votes
167
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 74
    Interoperable with Java
  • 55
    Functional Programming support
  • 51
    Null Safety
  • 47
    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
    No boiler plate code
Pros
  • 109
    ES6 code is shorter than traditional JS
  • 52
    Module System Standardized
  • 2
    Extremly compact
  • 2
    Destructuring Assignment
  • 1
    The database is recommended to use MySQL
Cons
  • 1
    Suffers from baggage
  • 1
    Create Node.js

What are some alternatives to Kotlin, ES6?

JavaScript

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

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

PHP

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

Ruby

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.

Java

Java

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!

Golang

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

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#

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

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

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.

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