Kotlin

From JVMLangSummit
Revision as of 17:15, 20 July 2011 by Abuckley (talk | contribs)
Jump to navigationJump to search
Title
The Kotlin Programming language
Speaker
Andrey Breslav
Resources
Slides and Kotlin homepage
Abstract

We present a new statically typed JVM-targeted programming language developed by JetBrains and intended for industrial use.

We’ve been developing for the Java platform for a long time, and we know how good it is. On the other hand, we know that the Java programming language has certain limitations and problems that are either impossible or very hard to fix due to backward-compatibility issues. We know that Java is going to stand long, but we believe that the community can benefit from a new statically typed JVM-targeted language free of the legacy trouble and having the features so desperately wanted by the developers.

The main design goals behind this project are

  • to create a Java-compatible language,
  • that compiles as fast as Java,
  • make it safer than Java, i.e. statically check for common pitfalls such as null pointer dereference,
  • make it more concise than Java by supporting local type-inference, first-class functions (closures), extension functions, mixins and first-class delegation, etc;
  • and, keeping the useful level of expressiveness (see above), make it way simpler than the most mature competitor -- Scala.