Java and Kotlin, a performance comparison

When it comes to developing software, it is important to keep in mind a variety of factors. It is paramount that software is fast, responsive, optimized, and able to be stored and used by the end consumer. This is especially true within fields such as medical care or critical systems where the speed is critical to the end-user and where the memory and storage capacity may all be a limiting factor to the software. This paper evaluates the differences in performance between the Java programming language and the Kotlin programming language. This paper evaluates this by comparing performance by experiment, comparing metrics between the two and relevant literature review about the subject. The results show an overall better performance of Java in most occasions, with Kotlin managing to perform better in much fewer benchmarks. These differences are mostly not very significant, however there are exceptions where Kotlin is performing considerably worse. That happens particularly when a lot of the Kotlin idiomatic features are implemented, which add a big overhead and if performance is a big concern, they should be used sparingly