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0 pointsincepted10y ago0 comments

> Currently looking in to groovy for android dev precisely based on this observation

You should look at Kotlin, I can't imagine any good reason to use Groovy on Android with Kotlin around.

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I've seen Kotlin - few issues :

* it isn't 1.0 yet (guaranteed to have breaking changes)

* I don't see it as a dynamic/prototyping language - I see it more as a C# than as Python, frankly for the front end code that I want to write the python style of development is much faster and Groovy seems to have an answer if the performance of dynamic typing ends up being an issue. Most of the complex datastractures are in C++ anyway and will have a simple/clean interface to the front end

* it's an extra language to learn - not only me but by my coworkers as well. We already took on Groovy with Grails and we have a decent amount of build automation in it (and will have more)

I've learned a lot of languages so far (C++, Python, C#, Java, Clojure, JavaScript and I've played with Rust, F#, TypeScript, Objective C) - frankly the value of having as few languages as possible to share the actual code/tools/knowledge between different areas is huge and in order to introduce a new language to the mix it better have a significant benefit over the ones already used.

inceptedOP10y ago

That's fair.

There are a few pros, though, one of which being that JetBrains is fully behind Android, and as a consequence, the Kotlin runtime is very small. Do you know how many methods Groovy's is?

I think you will also find out that Groovy's performance is going to be a problem on Android, but maybe it will be fast enough for you.

vorg10y ago

> Groovy seems to have an answer if the performance of dynamic typing ends up being an issue

What answer is this? Groovy's statically type compilation mode? You're better off from a QA perspective just using Java code.

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