Kotlin is a game-changing programming language that has taken the world of app development by storm. As a cross-platform, statically typed, and general-purpose high-level language with type inference, Kotlin has quickly become the go-to choice for developers looking to create fast, efficient, and scalable applications.

Origins

The name "Kotlin" is derived from Kotlin Island, a Russian island in the Gulf of Finland, near Saint Petersburg. Andrey Breslav, Kotlin's former lead designer, mentioned that the team decided to name it after an island, in imitation of the Java programming language which shares a name with the Indonesian island of Java.

Development

The first commit to the Kotlin Git repository was on November 8, 2010. In July 2011, JetBrains unveiled Project Kotlin, a new language for the JVM, which had been under development for a year. JetBrains lead Dmitry Jemerov said that most languages did not have the features they were looking for, with the exception of Scala. However, he cited the slow compilation time of Scala as a deficiency.

Features

Kotlin is designed to interoperate fully with Java and targets the JVM, allowing developers to create applications that run smoothly on Android devices. Additionally, Kotlin compiles to JavaScript (e.g., for frontend web applications using React) or native code via LLVM (e.g., for native iOS apps sharing business logic with Android apps). Language development costs are borne by JetBrains, while the Kotlin Foundation protects the Kotlin trademark.

Design

Development lead Andrey Breslav has said that Kotlin is designed to be an industrial-strength object-oriented language and a "better language" than Java, but still be fully interoperable with Java code. This allows companies to make a gradual migration from Java to Kotlin.

Syntax

Kotlin relaxes Java's restriction of allowing static methods and variables to exist only within a class body. Static objects and functions can be defined at the top level of the package without needing a redundant class level. For compatibility with Java, Kotlin provides a JvmName annotation which specifies a class name used when the package is viewed from a Java project.

History

Kotlin 1.0 was released on February 15, 2016. This is considered to be the first officially stable release and JetBrains has committed to long-term backwards compatibility starting with this version. At Google I/O 2017, Google announced first-class support for Kotlin on Android. On May 7, 2019, Google announced that Kotlin programming language had become its preferred language for Android app developers.

Future

Kotlin continues to evolve and improve, with recent additions such as contracts, which are inspired by Eiffel's design by contract programming paradigm. Following ScalaJS, Kotlin code may be transpiled to JavaScript, allowing for interoperability between code written in the two languages. This can be used either to write full web applications in Kotlin or to share code between a Kotlin backend and a JavaScript frontend.

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