Kotlin is a new programming language created by JetBrains, the folks behind such great developer tools as IntelliJ, WebStorm and Resharper. It is a statically typed language the runs in the JVM, on Android and as of this release, compiled to JavaScript. Kotlin was designed to be a lot more concise than Java, one of the biggest pain points people have with the language. It is also meant to be 100% interoperable with existing Java code and frameworks. Today’s release also brings JavaScript support out of “experimental” status, now enabling Kotlin to compile down to JavaScript much like other languages such as TypeScript and Dart. This release also brings CoRoutine support for easier async programming.
From the announcement blog post:
Our vision for Kotlin is to enable the use of a single expressive, performant, strongly typed language across all components of a modern application. Kotlin 1.1 makes two major steps towards this goal.
First, the JavaScript target is no longer experimental, and supports all Kotlin language features, a large part of the standard library, as well as JavaScript interoperability. This allows you to migrate the browser frontend of your applications to Kotlin, while continuing to use modern JavaScript development frameworks such as React.
Second, we’re introducing support for coroutines. As a lightweight alternative to threads, coroutines enable much more scalable application backends, supporting massive workloads on a single JVM instance. In addition to that, coroutines are a very expressive tool for implementing asynchronous behavior, which is important for building responsive user interfaces on all platforms.
Below we describe these two changes further. In other news: we’ve added type aliases, bound callable references, destructuring in lambdas and more. See the details in our What’s new page (check out the runnable examples!).
Kotlin is available as a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans and Eclipse.