Kotlin 1.0 Released

Qbertino writes: Kotlin, one of the challengers to Java's VM, has been released in version 1. Kotlin is object-oriented, statically typed and comes with professional IDE support by Jetbrains — which is no big surprise, since it's the Jetbrains employees who developed the programming language that saw the light of day four years ago. Kotlin is already in real-world use and development will be moving into fleshing out the Kotlin feature set without breaking backwards compatibility. These features include planned support for JavaScript — which sounds interesting considering JS has gained quite some traction recently. Kotlin is FOSS and is released under the Apache license.

Comments

JVM challenger OR Java challenger on the JVM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is it? The summary makes it sound like Kotlin has its own VM (JVM compatible I'd assume) to compete with Oracle's JVM. The web page makes it sound like Kotlin is just a language that compiles to the JVM's bytecode. Which is it? Or is it a both?

This JVM stuff is BS

[NotInHere]

All the new JVM based languages that are popping up are just syntactic sugar on top of Java. The real concepts can't be shaken, as the JVM is pretty much limited in what it can do and what it can't.

Telling from the examples, Kotlin seems to be a good example: Yet another poor copy of Java with some "obsolete" things like the semicolon removed (why is there so much hate for it?), and you write "fun" instead of "function". So what. I don't think this makes me more productive than Java. Its just for all the people who keep preaching "java is shit" because they've heard it somewhere and now they want to use a "much better" language.

If Kotlin suits, Java is fine for the job as well, and most likely its even better.

Re:This JVM stuff is BS

[NotInHere]

C# is Microsoft's copy of Java. Its garbage collected and runs in a VM. Just like java. They even had a language called J# for a while (guess what its a copy of), but abandoned the project.

Java and C# and the like fill a nice niche. Nobody really wants to touch javascript, its more a mess than a language (C++ is a mess too, with std having been very limited in the past, before C++11, and thus every major codebase using their own NIH containers and stuff, but javascript is much much worse). And python has this issue with obligatory indentation.

Re:Java, utter bloat to sink your boat

[angel'o'sphere]

If c programmers needed that level of support, they'd be told to go back to school and really learn the language.

Code completion is rather useful for libraries. It has obviously nothing to do with "language".

And I rather have my method calls autocompleted, especially when I also autocomplete arguments, than having the compiler give me 25 errors per file I worked on the last hour because I have a typo every where.

There are plenty of reasons why people use auto completion ... "not knowing the language" is very likely the least one.