Use Kotlin

[veyndan]

With Google officially endorsing Kotlin, and the maturity that Kotlin is gaining, I feel that it could be a good idea to use it. There are a ton of benefits to using Kotlin, much of it discussed in a quick Google search so I want bore anyone by listing the benefits here. A couple of major benefits specific to the app is that through the (correct) adoption of Kotlin, all NPE's should vanish and that we don't have to completely convert the app over to Kotlin all in one go.

A counter argument that you might have for not using Kotlin is that the method count will increase, but note that some people have noted that the method count in the app ultimately decreased due to the conciseness that Kotlin brings.

[Meisolsson]

Kotlin will be a thing but I'm not comfortable enough with it yet. When I am the first thing to be changed will be the Gropie items since the ViewHolders can be generated by the kotlin android extension.

So hopfully Kotilin will be a thing in a week or so. From that point every class which gets changed more than a couple of lines should be converted. So the change will be incremental.

[veyndan]

From that point every class which gets changed more than a couple of lines should be converted.

Just to clarify, does this mean that if someone wanted to change some code of a class, they are allowed to convert the class to Kotlin before making such a change? Is it just that you don't want people converting Java classes to Kotlin classes willy-nilly without any functional change (which'd make sense due to unnecessary conflicts and easy PR abuse)?

[Meisolsson]

Exactly.