When comparing Kotlin vs C#, the Slant community recommends Kotlin for most people. In the question“What are the best languages for learning functional programming?” Kotlin is ranked 14th while C# is ranked 25th. The most important reason people chose Kotlin is:
Since Kotlin is made by Jetbrains (the developers of IntelliJ IDEA) so it stands to reason that the IntelliJ support for Kotlin is also great. Besides that, Kotlin also works well with existing Java tools such as Eclipse, Maven, Gradle, Android Studio, etc...
Specs
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Pros
Pro Great tooling support
Since Kotlin is made by Jetbrains (the developers of IntelliJ IDEA) so it stands to reason that the IntelliJ support for Kotlin is also great. Besides that, Kotlin also works well with existing Java tools such as Eclipse, Maven, Gradle, Android Studio, etc...
Pro Easy adoption for existing Java programmers
Kotlin runs on the JVM and Java interoperability has been one of the main objectives since the language was born. It runs everywhere Java does; web servers, mobile devices (Android), and desktop applications. It also works with all the major tools in the Java ecosystem like Eclipse, IntelliJ, Maven, Ant, Gradle, Spring Boot, etc.
All of this makes adoption extremely easy even for existing Java projects. On top of this there's also ensured Type safety and less boilerplate code needed.
Pro Easy to learn if you have prior programming experience
Kotlin's syntax is extremely easy to understand. The language can be picked up in a few hours just by reading the language reference.
Pro No runtime overhead
The standard library is relatively small and tight. It mostly consists of focused extensions of the Java standard library and as such adds no additional runtime overhead to existing Java projects.
Pro Officially supported for Android development
Starting with version 3.0 of Android Studio, Kotlin support will be built-in. This means that it's now easier than ever to use Kotlin for existing Android projects or even start writing Android apps only with Kotlin from scratch.
This also means that Kotlin and Kotlin plugins for Android Studio will be fully supported in the future and their likelihood of being abandoned is quite small since Google is fully embracing the language for their Android ecosystem (alongside Java and C++).
Pro Low-risk adoption for existing Java codebases
Since it has such a good interoperability with Java, Java libraries, and Java tools. It can be adopted for an existing Java codebase at little to no cost. The codebase can be converted from Java to Kotlin little by little without ever disrupting the functionality of the application itself.
Pro Does not impose a particular philosophy of programming
It's not overly OOP like Java and it does not enforce strict functional paradigms either.
Pro Is built to solve industrial problems
Kotlin has been designed and built by developers who have an industrial background and not an academic one. As such, it tries to solve issues mostly found in industrial settings. For example, the Kotlin type system helps developers avoid null pointer exceptions. Reasearch languages usually do not have null
at all, but APIs and large codebases usually need null
.
Pro Versatile
.NET offers rich functionality.
Pro Visual Studio
The Visual Studio IDE offers one of the best development environments. The Community Edition and Visual Studio Code can be used for free.
Pro Forms
Can be designed visually with the Visual Studio designer for traditional Windows forms, WPF, or Web forms.
Pro 3rd Party support
Lot's of tools and libraries available.
Pro Can be used in a variety of fields
With Xamarin for Mobile (ios, android),
with .net core asp for server (linux, windows),
with .net core for desktop (windows, mac),
with mono for desktop (windows, linux),
with blazor for web client with webassembly.
However, it is not considered top for any of those categories, but it is top choice for Windows desktop with .net framework and top choice for Unity.
.net 5 will unify frameworks similar to JVM (just one).
Pro Cross-Platform
Runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows.
Pro Supported By Microsoft
Constant updates and bug fixes to many popular frameworks, as well as great first-party support from Microsoft. This can be a con as well in certain circumstances.
Pro It is a C like language
Being a C like language counts in favor for it as a general purpose programming language, given the ease of using existing skills to pick up this language easily.
There are other superior languages that could be used as a general purpose, such as: F#, Haskell, but the complexity of those languages, being functional, make them strange to the usual C Syntax.
C# is better than C whenever garbage collection, Objects, classes, data access, are needed. But C is going to be the choice when hardware access and performance are paramount.
Cons
Con May be hard for programmers already used to imperative style to learn functional programming from Kotlin
Since Kotlin does not enforce any particular paradigms and is not purely functional, it can be pretty easy to fall back to imperative programming habits if a programmer comes from an imperative background.
Con The need for Java interoperability has forced some limitations
The need to make Kotlin interoperable with Java has caused some unintuitive limitations to the language design.
Con Learning curve
For a beginner the .NET framework can be daunting, the rich functionality means that things often can be done in several ways.
Con Very large runtime
Cannot be used for embedded programming.
Con Microsoft will mess up with the Visual studio installation
And all of a sudden you'll need to reinstall the entire thing just because it stopped working.
Microsoft assumes that every workstation is connected to the Internet then it is always pushing updates.
Con .NET is a mess
Troublesome in regards to being Microsoft centric, updates, security, excessively large, cross-platform issues, etc...
Con Windows OS centric
Not very good at being a cross-platform programming language.
Con Strictly object oriented
Con Owned by Microsoft
And like always, Microsoft is to be avoided, no exceptions.