Kotlin is a free language released as an open source project in 2012 by JetBrains, a Czech software development company. The first stable release of Kotlin 1.0 was in February of 2016. In 2017 Google announced first-class support for Kotlin on android. In 2016 Kotlin began officially supporting sharing code between JVM and JavaScript platforms. In 2019 Google announced that Kotlin was the preferred language for Android app developers.
Kotlin is a statically typed general-purpose high-level programming language with type inference. Kotlin uses smart casting which casts a variable to a type in a block where a type check has been performed on the variable. Kotlin was created to have the functionality of Scala, with a while being concise, powerful, and compiling quickly. It supports both object oriented and functional programming.
Kotlin is fully interoperable with Java and accepts existing Java libraries. This means that Java developers can start using Kotlin without rewriting all of their existing Java code. Kotlin/JS is compatible with JavaScript and can use many of JavaScript’s modules, including react. Kotlin typically transpiles to Java and Kotlin/JS compiles to JavaScript. Kotlin/Native is intended to compile directly to machine code. Kotlin Multiplatform, which was announced as stable in November of 2023, allows developers to use Kotlin with the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), Kotlin/JS, and Kotlin Native in a single codebase allowing for efficient and intuitive cross-platform development.
Kotlin handles asynchronous code using Coroutines, which are built on top of threads and communicate with each other using channels. Coroutines offer an elegant and concise way to handle asynchronous code. They are non-blocking by default, but can be explicitly set to be blocking. Coroutines have built in cancellation.
Kotlin has strong null safety: if a type or class may have a null value, the developer must explicitly declare this by putting a “?” after the data type in the declaration. Kotlin has an immutable data class that is intended to store data that will not change. Kotlin’s null safety and data class make code more robust and guard against errors.
Kotlin has many data types that will be familiar to programmers, and also offers a wide variety of collections including lists, sets, maps, and ranges. Lists are an ordered collection that can be accessed by an index property and can contain duplicates. Sets are an unordered collection that does not allow duplicates. Maps are an unordered collection of key-value pairs. These collections can have a mutable property which allows them to be modified.
Kotlin is a broad, powerful, and multi-purpose language. It is increasing in popularity and is Google’s language of choice for android app development. It is an ideal language for large projects because it is robust and for cross-platform development because of its interoperability and multiplatform capability.
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