Outside of Android, however, there is no recommendation to replace Java with Kotlin. Though Kotlin 1.0 was introduced much later, in 2016, Kotlin quickly became the official preferred language for Android development in 2019.

Java is a much more mature language than Kotlin, with its first release in 1996. Kotlin is similarly versatile: It targets the JVM, Android, JavaScript, and Kotlin/Native, and can also be used for server-side, web, and desktop development. Java can be used in server-side applications, databases, web front-end applications, embedded systems and enterprise applications, mobile, and more.

And the two languages can call into each other easily: You can call Java code from Kotlin and Kotlin code from Java. Both Kotlin and Java run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) instead of building directly to native code. Indeed, the two languages have a lot in common from a high-level perspective. In this article, we will break down Kotlin’s and Java’s differences and similarities so you can make informed decisions and move seamlessly between the two. But both Kotlin and Java offer many strengths as general-purpose languages, and it’s important for developers to understand the language differences, for purposes such as migrating from Java to Kotlin. It’s true that Java lost the Android battle to Kotlin, which is now Google’s preferred language and therefore better suited to new mobile apps.

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