Developer tooling company JetBrains has released Kotlin 2.0 with a stable K2 compiler rewritten for multi-platform from the ground up, amid other changes and capabilities.
According to Daria Voronina, writing about the Kotlin 2.0 highlights for JetBrains, the 2.0 version is a “huge milestone” for the company and will deliver a “significant performance boost” to users’ daily productivity.
“Enhancements and additions in Kotlin 2.0 and the long-term vision for Kotlin (include) upcoming language features such as context parameters, signature management, and immutability,” she wrote in the blog post.
The Kotlin programming language is a Apache 2 open-source project, with source code, tooling and documentation maintained on GitHub and a hundred or so external contributors so far, although most of the team hail from JetBrains.
JetBrains asks prospective contributors to future Kotlin improvements to start with issues tagged as ‘up for grabs’ on GitHub. Documentation, tutorials, presentations, translations and community projects are all welcome, the vendor said.
Voronina noted other just-announced updates in Kotlin 2.0, including official Google support of Kotlin Multiplatform for sharing business logic across mobile, web, server, and desktop.
“This helps increase developers’ productivity and fits well with Android’s Kotlin-first approach, resulting in higher-quality Android apps,” she wrote.
In addition, a 1.6.10 release of Compose Multiplatform promoted iOS support to beta and added features including new scroll physics, native text fields, text selection, and magnification as well as Amper build tooling and IDE features.
JetBrains is also working on ways to fine-tune and train large language models (LLMs), with the Kotlin ML pack of tools, data and models to assist code modelling in Kotlin.
“Designed based on the extensive research we’ve conducted, this pack provides ML researchers with additional tools and ideas they can apply to other programming languages,” Voronina said.
The Kotlin plugins that support Kotlin 2.0.0 are bundled in the latest IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio, the vendor said.
Kotlin has rapidly gained traction on the server-side with major companies like AWS, Adobe, Atlassian, and Google adopting it; it is currently the primary language for Android development, with 95% of some 1,000 Android apps containing Kotlin code, according to JetBrains.
