We’re excited to announce the start of the early access program for Kotlin 1.2: today its first milestone release 1.2-M1 is out.
This release enables by default new language features that were previously available in 1.1.x releases under experimental 1.2 language version setting. Also in the standard library you can preview the new API.
The complete though not so big list of changes in this release can be found in the changelog.
We’re happy to announce the release of Kotlin 1.1.3, a new bugfix and tooling update for Kotlin 1.1. The update brings a number of new IDE features, performance improvements in the compiler and IDE, efficiency improvements for generated bytecode, and lots of bugfixes. The update is compatible with all versions of IntelliJ IDEA from 2016.2 until 2017.2, as well as with Android Studio 2.3 and 3.0 Canary.
Note: There is an issue with Android Studio 3.0 Canary 4 which prevents correct loading of Kotlin plugin updates, so you won’t be able to install this update into Canary 4. Kotlin 1.1.3 will be bundled into Android Studio 3.0 Canary 5.
The complete list of changes in this release can be found in the changelog.
We’re happy to announce the release of Kotlin/Native v0.3. We are going to the new lands! With the release of version v0.3 Windows is supported as both a compilation host and execution target, and Google Android devices as an execution target with native activities. So Windows API ‘Hello World’ may look as easy as:
|
1 2 3 4 |
import win32.* fun main(args: Array<String>) { MessageBoxW(null, "Привет!","标题", MB_YESNOCANCEL or MB_ICONQUESTION) } |
With all the exciting recent events, we had to postpone the publication of the Future Features Survey results. Sorry about that. Better late than never, this blog post summarizes what we learned from the survey.
To recap, the Future Features Survey ran in April and got about 850 replies. We would like to thank everyone who took part in the survey!
The raw (anonymized) data for the survey are available here.
The questions asked were:
You can see the list of proposed features here.
We received a total of 852 responses (a few of them blank). Most people used up all three slots for positive feature nomination, and some 300+ people skipped the negative nomination.
Here’s the summary chart of all results (sorted by nominations in favour of a feature):
Today, at the Google I/O keynote, the Android team announced first-class support for Kotlin. We believe this is a great step for Kotlin, and fantastic news for Android developers as well as the rest of our community. We’re thrilled with the opportunities this opens up.
For Android developers, Kotlin support is a chance to use a modern and powerful language, helping solve common headaches such as runtime exceptions and source code verbosity. Kotlin is easy to get started with and can be gradually introduced into existing projects, which means that your existing skills and technology investments are preserved.
Since we’ve launched the Kotlin community support program at the beginning of 2017, the number of user groups has grown to 45+ and 2-4 new user groups are joining us every month. To find one at your location, please, check the full list at the community section of kotlinlang.org.
Today we present the Kotlin user groups logo and a profile picture.
We’re happy to announce the release of Kotlin/Native v0.2, a feature and bugfix update to Kotlin/Native Technology Preview. This update adds support for coroutines and cross-module inline functions support, along with bugfixes and improvements all over the place.
This release includes samples showing how to use coroutines for concurrent non-blocking IO, a GUI application using GTK, as well as a TensorFlow machine learning framework client contributed by Julius Kunze. Continue reading
We’re happy to announce the release of Kotlin 1.1.2, the second bugfix and tooling update for Kotlin 1.1. The update brings performance improvements to the compiler and the IntelliJ IDEA plugin, several new features in the tools, and lots of bugfixes in all areas. Kotlin 1.1.2 also brings compatibility with version 2.4.0-alpha of the Android Gradle plugin.
The complete list of changes in this release can be found in the changelog.
We’d like to thank our external contributors whose pull requests were included in this release: Yoshinori Isogai, Jonathan Leitschuh and Kirill Rakhman. Thanks to everyone who tried the EAP builds and sent us feedback, too!
The Kotlin compiler now requires JDK 8 to run. You shouldn’t notice any changes, because most other Java development tools such as Gradle and the Android toolchain also require JDK 8, so you almost certainly already have it installed. For code generated by the compiler, Java 1.6 compatibility is still the default, and we have no plans to drop support for generating Java 1.6 compatible bytecode.
An object can no longer be declared inside an inner class. Such an object would be able to access the outer class instance, which is conceptually impossible because an object is always a singleton. inner sealed class’es are also prohibited. This is a temporary limitation which will be removed when we add the possibility to declare a subclass of an inner sealed class inside its outer class, and not inside the inner class itself. (KT-16232, KT-16233)
Using a declaration with a name consisting entirely of underscore characters now always requires backticks. (KT-16264)
Starting with this update, the Kotlin plugin no longer supports IntelliJ IDEA 2016.1. The plugin supports all IntelliJ IDEA versions starting from 2016.2, as well as all Android Studio versions starting from 2.2.
With Kotlin 1.1, targeting JavaScript in the Kotlin compiler has officially reached production-ready status. Of course, having compiler support is not enough to be able to solve real-life problems, so we continue our work on integrating Kotlin into the larger JavaScript ecosystem.
Today, we’d like to present two new projects: a Gradle plugin integrating Kotlin with npm, webpack and karma, and a full-stack application sample with a Kotlin/JVM backend and a Kotlin/JS frontend built with React.
The Kotlin frontend plugin allows you to build and deploy a Kotlin frontend application using webpack. You can use npm packages as dependencies of your application, and the plugin will take care of downloading them and bundling them into the resulting JS file. The plugin also integrates with Karma, allowing you to run the tests of your application. And for optimal workflow, the plugin supports continuous compilation and hot reload, ensuring that you always see an up-to-date version of your application in the browser.
The README file gives instructions for using the plugin, and the examples directory contains a simple example showing how you can apply it in a real project.
Thinkter is an example of a modern full-stack application built in Kotlin. The backend runs under Jetty and uses Ktor, a Kotlin Web application framework developed by the Kotlin team. The frontend uses React; a set of React wrappers for Kotlin is provided as part of the project. You’re welcome to use the wrappers in your project and adapt them to your own needs. Note that we’re working on evolving the React wrappers internally, and we’re considering releasing them as a separate open-source library.
To see what Kotlin React code looks like, you can check out one of the components of the application.
Your feedback on these releases is very much welcome! Please file issues on GitHub, stop by the forums, or join the #javascript channel on the Kotlin Slack.
The Kotlin 1.1 release was warmly met by the community. To demonstrate the new features in Kotlin 1.1, JetBrains offered an online event. All those interested were able to watch a live stream of Andrey Breslav’s demo presentation and get their questions answered during a Q&A session.
This motivated many local communities to meet up: more than 30 user groups hosted events in 21 countries.
You can find the full list of the events at the Kotlin community web page. Over 3000 people joined the broadcast on the day of the event.
The recording of the demo presentation and the Q&A is available on YouTube:
