Andrey Breslav mentioned that the team decided to name it after an island, just like Java was named after the Indonesian island of Java (though the programming language Java was perhaps named after the coffee rather than the island). The name comes from Kotlin Island, near St. In February 2012, JetBrains open sourced the project under the Apache 2 license. One of the stated goals of Kotlin is to compile as quickly as Java. However, he cited the slow compilation time of Scala as a deficiency.

JetBrains lead Dmitry Jemerov said that most languages did not have the features they were looking for, with the exception of Scala.

In July 2011, JetBrains unveiled Project Kotlin, a new language for the JVM, which had been under development for a year. Apple silicon support) is considered beta since version 1.3. Kotlin has support for the web by compiling to JavaScript (i.e., Kotlin/JS with the classic back-end, is declared stable since version 1.3), while the newer Kotlin/JS ( IR-based) is in beta as of version 1.5.30. The Android Kotlin compiler produces Java 8 bytecode by default (which runs in any later JVM), but lets the programmer choose to target Java 9 up to 19, for optimization, or allows for more features has bidirectional record class interoperability support for JVM, introduced in Java 16, considered stable as of Kotlin 1.5. Since the release of Android Studio 3.0 in October 2017, Kotlin has been included as an alternative to the standard Java compiler.

On, Google announced that the Kotlin programming language is now its preferred language for Android app developers. Language development costs are borne by JetBrains, while the Kotlin Foundation protects the Kotlin trademark. Kotlin mainly targets the JVM, but also 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). Kotlin is designed to interoperate fully with Java, and the JVM version of Kotlin's standard library depends on the Java Class Library, īut type inference allows its syntax to be more concise. Kotlin ( / ˈ k ɒ t l ɪ n/) is a cross-platform, statically typed, general-purpose high-level programming language with type inference.

Kotlin null safety