Kotlin Adoption in the Giant Java Application
summary
Kotlin adoption at Meta forces concrete tradeoffs: it takes ~8 months to make IDEs usable and a maintained fork of the Kotlin plugin to keep editors responsive; Android Studio shows ~10x worse module capacity for Kotlin until fixes land. Builds move from Gradle to Buck with API-jar and source-only ABI tricks that cut critical paths and yield about 77% fewer cache fetches and a 30% rebuild-time rise overall; lambda grouping and data-class generation cut method/count bloat and deliver a 60% improvement in analysis time for certain checks.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction and context
- 8:53Writing code at scale
- 18:38Tools and code quality
- 20:50Building Kotlin at scale
- 31:59Shipping optimized APKs
- 39:55Adoption state and takeaways
- 41:20Q&A
