Andrey Breslav and Dmitry Jemerov

JVM Language Summit 2011

Kotlin is a new JVM language under development by JetBrains. That's the company that makes IntelliJ IDEA, the well-regarded Java IDE. According to JetBrains, the main design goals behind this project are: to make Kotlin compile 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; and make it way simpler than the most mature competitor—Scala.

The compiler is being developed alongside with an IntelliJ IDEA integration, so the users will get IDE support as soon as they get the compiler (first public version is planned for the end of 2011).





