Introduction to Kotlin

Some years ago “alternative” programming languages for the JVM lived mostly in research labs and garages, industry knew about some of them, sometimes even used them, but never produced them. Recently, the trend has changed: new languages are backed by industrial vendors. To put it another way: the time has come for a new JVM language, and there are a few projects competing in this field. One of them is Kotlin, backed by JetBrains, a leading IDE vendor.

Kotlin is a modern statically typed language targeting JVM and JavaScript and intended for industrial use. The main goal behind this project is to create a language that would be a good tool for developers, i.e. will be safe, concise, flexible, 100% Java-compatible and well-supported by IDE and other tooling. Kotlin is an open-source project started developed JetBrains with the help of the community.

This session demonstrates the key features of Kotlin and provides a comparison to other “alternative” JVM languages.

Among others things, it covers

• Static null-safety
• Extension functions
• Higher-order functions and type-safe builders
• Smart casts: Kotlin's lightweight pattern matching
• Making Java APIs better with Kotlin
• Developing mixed Kotlin/Java projects

To find out more about Kotlin, please refer to http://kotlin.jetbrains.org