Kotlin vs Ruby

Overview

Ruby

Stacks46.0K

Followers21.8K

Votes4.0K

GitHub Stars23.0K

Forks5.5K

Kotlin

Stacks17.7K

Followers11.9K

Votes650

GitHub Stars51.5K

Forks6.1K

Kotlin vs Ruby: What are the differences?

Key Differences Between Kotlin and Ruby

1. Syntax: Kotlin and Ruby have different syntaxes. Kotlin is a statically typed language, similar to Java, while Ruby is a dynamically typed language. This means that in Kotlin, you need to explicitly declare the data types of variables, whereas in Ruby, you can simply assign values to variables without declaring their types.

2. Object-Oriented Programming (OOP): Both Kotlin and Ruby are object-oriented programming languages, but they approach OOP in different ways. Kotlin uses classes and objects for structuring code and follows a more traditional OOP approach, similar to Java. On the other hand, Ruby is more flexible and allows for dynamic changes to objects at runtime, making it easier to write concise and expressive code.

3. Null Safety: Kotlin has built-in null safety features, which help prevent null pointer exceptions during runtime. It enforces non-nullability by default, ensuring that variables cannot hold null values unless explicitly marked as nullable. In contrast, Ruby does not have built-in null safety features, and variables can hold nil values by default, potentially leading to null-related errors.

4. Concurrency and Parallelism: Kotlin provides built-in support for coroutines, which are lightweight threads that allow for concurrent programming. Coroutines make it easier to write asynchronous and concurrent code in a structured and readable manner. Ruby, on the other hand, does not have native support for coroutines or concurrency. It relies on external libraries or frameworks for achieving parallelism.

5. Performance: Kotlin is designed to be a high-performance language, as it compiles to Java byte code and can utilize Java libraries and frameworks. It offers similar performance to Java and can be used for developing high-performance applications. Ruby, however, is an interpreted language, which typically results in slower execution compared to compiled languages like Kotlin. It is better suited for web development and scripting tasks rather than performance-critical applications.

6. Developer Community: Kotlin is a relatively newer language compared to Ruby, but it has gained a significant following and has a growing developer community. It is officially supported by Google for Android development, which has contributed to its popularity. Ruby, on the other hand, has been around for much longer and has a mature and vibrant developer community. It has a wide range of libraries, frameworks, and resources available, making it a popular choice for web development.

In summary, Kotlin and Ruby differ in their syntax, object-oriented programming approaches, null safety features, concurrency support, performance characteristics, and developer communities.

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Advice on Ruby, Kotlin

Thomas

Talent Co-Ordinator at Tessian

Mar 11, 2020

Decided

In December we successfully flipped around half a billion monthly API requests from our Ruby on Rails application to some new Python 3 applications. Our Head of Engineering has written a great article as to why we decided to transition from Ruby on Rails to Python 3! Read more about it in the link below.

263k views263k

Comments

Andrew

Chief Software Architect at Xelex Digital, LLC

Jun 27, 2020

Decided

In 2015 as Xelex Digital was paving a new technology path, moving from ASP.NET web services and web applications, we knew that we wanted to move to a more modular decoupled base of applications centered around REST APIs.

To that end we spent several months studying API design patterns and decided to use our own adaptation of CRUD, specifically a SCRUD pattern that elevates query params to a more central role via the Search action.

Once we nailed down the API design pattern it was time to decide what language(s) our new APIs would be built upon. Our team has always been driven by the right tool for the job rather than what we know best. That said, in balancing practicality we chose to focus on 3 options that our team had deep experience with and knew the pros and cons of.

For us it came down to C#, JavaScript, and Ruby. At the time we owned our infrastructure, racks in cages, that were all loaded with Windows. We were also at a point that we were using that infrastructure to it's fullest and could not afford additional servers running Linux. That's a long way of saying we decided against Ruby as it doesn't play nice on Windows.

That left us with two options. We went a very unconventional route for deciding between the two. We built MVP APIs on both. The interfaces were identical and interchangeable. What we found was easily quantifiable differences.

We were able to iterate on our Node based APIs much more rapidly than we were our C# APIs. For us this was owed to the community coupled with the extremely dynamic nature of JS. There were tradeoffs we considered, latency was (acceptably) higher on requests to our Node APIs. No strong types to protect us from ourselves, but we've rarely found that to be an issue.

As such we decided to commit resources to our Node APIs and push it out as the core brain of our new system. We haven't looked back since. It has consistently met our needs, scaling with us, getting better with time as continually pour into and expand our capabilities.

446k views446k

Comments

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

Detailed Comparison

Ruby	Kotlin
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.	Kotlin is a statically typed programming language for the JVM, Android and the browser, 100% interoperable with Java
Statistics
GitHub Stars 23.0K	GitHub Stars 51.5K
GitHub Forks 5.5K	GitHub Forks 6.1K
Stacks 46.0K	Stacks 17.7K
Followers 21.8K	Followers 11.9K
Votes 4.0K	Votes 650
Pros & Cons
Pros 608 Programme friendly 538 Quick to develop 492 Great community 469 Productivity 432 Simplicity Cons 7 Really slow if you're not really careful 7 Memory hog 3 Nested Blocks can make code unreadable 2 Encouraging imperative programming 1 Ambiguous Syntax, such as function parentheses	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 Hard to make teams adopt the Kotlin style 2 Nonullpointer Exception 1 Slow compiler
Integrations
Rails	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Ruby, 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.

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

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.

Related Comparisons

Kotlin vs Ruby: What are the differences?

Key Differences Between Kotlin and Ruby

1. Syntax: Kotlin and Ruby have different syntaxes. Kotlin is a statically typed language, similar to Java, while Ruby is a dynamically typed language. This means that in Kotlin, you need to explicitly declare the data types of variables, whereas in Ruby, you can simply assign values to variables without declaring their types.

2. Object-Oriented Programming (OOP): Both Kotlin and Ruby are object-oriented programming languages, but they approach OOP in different ways. Kotlin uses classes and objects for structuring code and follows a more traditional OOP approach, similar to Java. On the other hand, Ruby is more flexible and allows for dynamic changes to objects at runtime, making it easier to write concise and expressive code.

3. Null Safety: Kotlin has built-in null safety features, which help prevent null pointer exceptions during runtime. It enforces non-nullability by default, ensuring that variables cannot hold null values unless explicitly marked as nullable. In contrast, Ruby does not have built-in null safety features, and variables can hold nil values by default, potentially leading to null-related errors.

4. Concurrency and Parallelism: Kotlin provides built-in support for coroutines, which are lightweight threads that allow for concurrent programming. Coroutines make it easier to write asynchronous and concurrent code in a structured and readable manner. Ruby, on the other hand, does not have native support for coroutines or concurrency. It relies on external libraries or frameworks for achieving parallelism.

5. Performance: Kotlin is designed to be a high-performance language, as it compiles to Java byte code and can utilize Java libraries and frameworks. It offers similar performance to Java and can be used for developing high-performance applications. Ruby, however, is an interpreted language, which typically results in slower execution compared to compiled languages like Kotlin. It is better suited for web development and scripting tasks rather than performance-critical applications.

6. Developer Community: Kotlin is a relatively newer language compared to Ruby, but it has gained a significant following and has a growing developer community. It is officially supported by Google for Android development, which has contributed to its popularity. Ruby, on the other hand, has been around for much longer and has a mature and vibrant developer community. It has a wide range of libraries, frameworks, and resources available, making it a popular choice for web development.

In summary, Kotlin and Ruby differ in their syntax, object-oriented programming approaches, null safety features, concurrency support, performance characteristics, and developer communities.

Kotlin vs Ruby

Overview

Kotlin vs Ruby: What are the differences?