Swift and Kotlin are two popular programming languages that are increasingly being used by programmers around the world, inevitably their popularity encourages more and more people to compare the two. Today, the topic of Swift vs Kotlin is one of the most interesting topics among programmers. And the comparison of the two often leads to new questions, for example, which we will discuss in this article: What if Kotlin was compatible with the iPhone? To answer that question, we have to understand each of them (Swift and Kotlin).
Let’s start with Swift!
It is a programming language that is very synonymous with iOS and macOS-based applications. This programming language has more focus on objects and functions that are structured in a block system. Developed for the first time by Chris Lattner, initially, it was intended to overcome problems related to Objective C.
The nice thing about Swift is the ability to write code that is compatible with the devices that are expected to run the code. For example mobile phones and desktops. Writing code with Swift can also be customized with the server as a reference.
Swift’s bibliography is also quite comprehensive as it includes many predefined methods. This implies simpler code maintenance, thereby minimizing the use of large classes which tend to be prone to programming errors. Swift adopts what is often referred to as “modern programming patterns”, i.e. no need to write additional lines of code, use of automatic reference calculations, initial initialization of variables, handling of errors that have occurred and may occur, and such things.
What about Kotlin?
Kotlin is the “new programming language” as it was only introduced about 7 years ago by Google and JetB rains. Since this was introduced by Google, it can be concluded that Kotlin was created for the Android system. Its first stable version was Kotlin 1.0 and it has been used by most Android app developers so far. Kotlin can run on the JVM platform and is also compatible with Java. The typing nature of Kotlin code is static but adaptive to various platforms.
But unlike Java, Kotlin is more expressive in terms of syntax (more like Python). Any developer who wants to use Kotlin should have a good knowledge of Java first. Some limitations that Java has have been removed completely in Kotlin, for example, the semicolon. In the Kotlin ecosystem, the semicolon is optional, it can be replaced with a newline character. To add static variables and methods can be removed completely in the body of the class and they can be defined at the top level of the package.
What if Kotlin was compatible with iPhone?
From an implementation point of view, they look mostly similar to each other but there is a difference in principle here. Swift has an underscore ( _ ) as a prefix (which is not implemented in Kotlin).
In the context of extensions as added functionality, Swift accommodates that while Kotlin does not. Thus any developer using Kotlin is more often than not met with “default constraints.”
What about error handling by both? Swift uses nil and Kotlin uses null as a keyword for error handling. But the error handling function accommodated by both is the same.
And finally is memory management where Swift implements better memory management because the ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) it uses is more thorough than the GCA (Garbage Collection Approach) that Kotlin uses.
Broadly speaking, Swift and Kotlin are not very different languages but what if Kotlin was compatible with iPhone?
It should be noted that today we have quite a number of Kotlin compiler options and some of them can generate Swift-compatible code. Thus “a universal language” to handle the same application development on iOS and Android makes sense. It’s worth noting though that while some Kotlin compilers can be used to develop iPhone apps, the same development with Swift is still more efficient and precise.
