JVM environment and tooling have much better support for organizing the code in multi-module projects. It forces you to always write a standalone function that can not be connected to a specific class or interface. The last thing is that PHP has no extension functions support. Also, it’s harder to write the function itself because again of no generic types support. It makes development harder because IDE will not resolve it. In PHP you can’t pass the structure of the callback function. In functional programming, it might be a problem, especially if you would like to write a high-order function working on a specific type. When you iterate over the array you never know what kind of values are inside. PHP is not supporting typed/generic collections. You need to learn a lot of array_* and str* and str_* functions that are not always self-descriptive. What are the potential benefits of switching to Kotlin/JVM?Įveryone who had to make some operations on arrays or strings in PHP knows this pain.

null safe operator = null safe operatorĪs you can notice, PHP developers might be inspired by JVM-based languages.

promoted constructor properties -> primary constructor properties.

“never” return type in PHP -> Nothing in Kotlin.

The main issues for me with PHP were not the code style and code structures - these things are pretty much similar now: When I was switching to Kotlin, all these things were missing. The latest PHP releases(8.0, 8.1) introduced a lot of good things, like attributes, defining properties in constructors, match expression, null safe operator, enums, and “never” return type. Also, I want to recommend Kotlin as the possible choice when looking for a new opportunity. I want to share with you my personal feeling about this change. It’s been one year since I decided to switch from PHP to Kotlin.