When comparing Cor vs Kotlin, the Slant community recommends Kotlin for most people. In the question“What are the best languages that compile to JavaScript? ” Kotlin is ranked 4th while Cor is ranked 42nd. 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...
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Pros
Pro Easy to debug
Cor supports source-maps, allowing you the easy debugging in major browsers. However a line of Cor source is compiled to the exact line number in JavaScript for accurated debugging when developing in platforms that doesn't supports source-maps such as servers.
Pro Clean syntax
Cor enables you to write large applications by providing a clean syntax, classes and a modular architecture to keep organized code, enforcing the writing of readable source code based on conventions.
Pro Cross platform
Cor compiles to plain JavaScript, so, to run it in Node.js or in the browser is piece of cake.
Pro Support coroutines
Cor support coroutines which can be chained, stopped, and synchronized, fitting very well into the web asynchronous world.
Pro Hot reload
Cor provides a smooth front-end development by furnishing a builtin hot-loader which resolves dependences and compiles source code on the fly, with just reloading the Web page. You will only need to use CLI tools to deliver a production-ready version of the app.
Pro Concurrent and parallel
Cor allows to synchronize coroutines by passing messages through channels, and supports the execution of many tasks in parallel, all of that by writing sequential code.
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
.
Cons
Con Work in progress
Cor is still a very much young project (as of November 2015) with just one contributor, few stars on GitHub and virtually no learning resources outside the official documentation.
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.
