JetBrains officially releases Kotlin 2.0 in a major update to the programming language

Software development tool company JetBrains sro today announced the groundbreaking release of Kotlin 2.0, and main updating the programming language used on Android and for cross-platform development.

Announced during KotlinConf 2024new stable version 2.0 was prescribed According to JetBrains, from scratch and based on a new architecture that significantly improves performance and will help increase developer productivity. The company added that compilation times for projects on K2 are up to twice as fast on the new compiler as on Kotlin 1.9.20.

“Today, 2 million developers use Kotlin for every task you can imagine: from building beautiful cross-platform applications, to Minecraft mods, to powerful server applications, to groundbreaking LLM-based tools,” said Egor Tolstoy, Kotlin project manager at JetBrains. “A new compiler architecture was built so that we can develop the language much easierWe can introduce new features faster and in a consistent and platform-agnostic way.”

In May 2019, Google LLC announced that Kotlin is the preferred programming language for its Android operating system, which powers the company’s line of mobile devices and laptops. Since the release of Android Studio 3.0 in 2017, Kotlin has been an alternative to the standard Java compiler. The programming language can also be integrated with Java and compiled to JavaScript for front-end web applications or native code to support native iOS applications that share logic with Android applications.

More than 15,000 developers participated in the Kotlin 2.0 preview, including companies such as Meta Platforms Inc., which have already migrated large portions of their code bases to the new language paradigm. From today’s version you can safely start migrating to this version.

JetBrains has also improved tools for Cross-platform Kotlina way to reuse code across different operating system environments using a single, comprehensive tool built on top of the platform Fleet platform. Fleet is a lightweight, standalone development environment for developers, now in preview, who want to jump start their coding project and get down to the basics with a clean user interface and experience.

With new cross-platform features, it fully understands Xcode projects and has full support for the Swift programming language, including experimental Swift export capabilities for iOS. With this change, developers writing platform-specific code on iOS will have full support from the code editor, including inspections, navigation, and refactoring, which will also work across languages.

Open source Kotlin dataset for LLM and AI applications

With the release of Kotlin 2.0, the open-source Kotlin dataset will be available along with the Kotlin 7B language model, which will help developers of large language models and AI code generation tools improve their performance.

The release of the Kotlin language model unlocks a powerful knowledge base about AI models and code generation tools. This will enable developers to create higher quality Kotlin code. Scientists and enthusiasts can now experiment with the dataset and model today.

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