Kotlin Roundup: KotlinConf 2024 Keynote Highlights

Last week, we announced the release of Kotlin 2.0 with a stable K2 compiler, the foundation for Kotlin evolution. Rewritten from scratch, K2 is multiplatform from the ground up, more performant, and safe to migrate. Kotlin 2.0 is a huge milestone for us, and a significant performance boost for your daily productivity. Discover the full story behind Kotlin 2.0 and the fascinating insights in our recent blog post.

During his talk “Kotlin Language Features in 2.0 and Beyond,” Michail Zarečenskij, Kotlin’s Lead Language Designer at JetBrains, discussed the enhancements and additions in Kotlin 2.0 and the long-term vision for Kotlin, including upcoming language features such as context parameters, signature management, and immutability. Watch the full recording of Michail’s talk to get more insights into Kotlin 2.0 and the language’s future.

Android has been actively supporting Kotlin since 2017. During Google I/O 2024, Google announced that it now officially supports Kotlin Multiplatform for sharing business logic across mobile, web, server, and desktop. As stated in the official announcement, this helps increase developers’ productivity and fits well with Android’s Kotlin-first approach, resulting in higher-quality Android apps. Learn about all of the details in Google’s blog post.

The 1.6.10 release of Compose Multiplatform brings several powerful features, as well as promoting iOS support to Beta. Since entering the Alpha stage a year ago, Compose Multiplatform for iOS has received many improvements. Interactions feel more natural thanks to new scroll physics, native text fields, text selection, and magnification. Popup, dialog, and other widget interactions all have a more organic feel. Another great piece of news is that the experimental Web target is now in Alpha.

The standalone version of Amper is now available for you to try as a preview, in addition to the Gradle-based version. It currently works with JVM and Android applications, including the use of Compose Multiplatform for these targets. Check out our blog post to explore a brand-new way of using Amper, see how the tooling has improved recently, and learn what’s new in Amper 0.3.0.

Uber has joined the Kotlin Foundation as a Silver Member! We warmly welcome Uber and are happy to have them on board. Besides embracing Kotlin, the company actively contributes to the language’s ecosystem. Uber has extensive knowledge and experience in Kotlin, and we look forward to collaborating with the company to support and advance the Kotlin ecosystem even further.

Last year, the Kotlin Foundation announced the Grants Program to recognize and reward the most outstanding contributions to the Kotlin ecosystem. The program attracted many talented authors with projects in different areas. Coil https://github.com/coil-kt/coil, Store https://github.com/MobileNativeFoundation/Store, Http4k https://github.com/http4k, KMP-NativeCoroutines https://github.com/rickclephas/KMP-NativeCoroutines, and Lyricist https://github.com/adrielcafe/lyricist were the first winners of this program, standing out for their quality, proposals, and alignment with our criteria. The Grants Program will continue this year, and we encourage authors of open-source libraries, frameworks, and tools to apply.

Kotlin is growing and enhancing: Two million developers regularly write Kotlin code and 92% of them are satisfied with the language. We are happy to see how global companies adopt Kotlin in their teams to make their developers’ lives easier and provide them with a better coding experience. During the keynote, Jeffrey van Gogh (Google), Julie Gunderson (Amazon Web Services), and Eve Matthaey (Meta) shared how their companies adopted Kotlin and their future plans. Check out the specific timestamps in the keynote video for insights straight from the source: Meta [10:40], Google [13:35], Amazon [46:10].

In alignment with our goal to provide tools that produce great Kotlin code, we are working on ways to fine-tune and train LLM models. Introducing the Kotlin ML Pack: a set of essential tools, data, and models to promote code modeling tasks for the Kotlin language. 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.

This contest was hosted by the Kotlin Foundation where students and recent graduates were invited to create cross-platform projects in Kotlin. Of the three winners, Patrycja Bachleda and Caleb Asira Etemesi joined us at the event, while Samson Aricha Momanyi was unable to attend due to personal reasons. Their projects, noted for their creativity and impact, earned them a trip to KotlinConf 2024 – an experience unmatched by any other. During the KotlinConf Closing Panel, we welcomed our Kotlin Multiplatform Contest winners on stage.

We recently introduced a new UI component in Kotlin DataFrame 0.13.1, which enhances the data exploration experience inside the Kotlin Notebook plugin. With features like navigation through hierarchies, easy copying, file export, and tabbing, the new UI component makes your data exploration smoother and more intuitive.