Introduction to Kotlin: A Powerful Programming Language

Kotlin is a statically typed, cross-platform, general-purpose coding language that features type inference. It can interoperate with JVM and Java based on the Java Class Library. However, the type inference also features a concise syntax. Let’s find out more about this programming language

Basically, Kotlin’s primary target is JVM but it may compile to native or JavaScript as well. JetBrains is responsible for the language development costs. On the other hand, Kotlin Foundation offers protection for the Kotlin trademark.

Officially, Kotlin has Google’s backing for mobile development on the mobile OS giant Android. After the introduction of Android Studio 3.0 in 2017, the language has become a good alternative to the regular Java compiler. With this compiler, you can go for either Java 8 or Java 6 compatible bytecode.

History

In 2011, JetBrains introduced Project Kotlin, which is a fresh coding language for the popular JVM. According to Dmitry Jemerov, most languages didn’t have their desired features except Scala.

Also, he said that the Scala has a shortcoming: it has a slow compilation time. The goal of Kotlin is to allow faster compilation like Java. In 2012, the project was marked open source by JetBrains under the license called Apache 2.

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JetBrains is hopeful that the language can drive the sales of IntelliJ IDEA. On February 15, Kotlin v1.0 was out. It is the first known stable release and features backward compatibility as well.

During the 2017 Google I/O festival, the search engine giant introduced Kotlin support for Android. In 2017, Kotlin v1.2 was out. The next version was out on October 29th of 2018 and brought coroutines in order for asynchronous coding.

In 2019, the search engine giant Google made an announcement that Kotlin is its most preferred language for app developers of Android.

Design

According to Andrey Breslav, Kotlin is a great object-oriented language, which has industrial-strength. Also, it is better than Java and can be interoperated with Java code, which allows many companies to migrate to Java gradually.

Semicolons are not mandatory to terminate a statement. Usually, a new line is enough to end the statement. The parameter lists and variable declarations allow putting the data type after the name of the variable just like TypeScript and Pascal.

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Variables can be immutable, mutable or declared with the var or val keyword. By default, the class members are open to the public and they are also final. It means that you can’t create a derived class.

Apart from the methods and classes of object-based programming, this language supports procedural coding with functions. Kotlin functions offer support for overloading, named arguments, variable-length argument lists and so on.

The class member functions are dispatched on the basis of the object runtime type that they are called on.

In short, if you are interested in Kotlin programming language, we hope that this article may have provided you with a lot of useful information about the language. For further information, we suggest that you get in touch with a good professional. Hope this helps.

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Source by Dhanusuya K