Jonathan Lalou's blog

KotlinConf’23 kicked off with an energizing keynote, marking a highly anticipated return to an in-person format in Amsterdam. Hosted by Hadi Hariri from JetBrains, the session brought together key figures from both JetBrains and Google, including Roman Elizarov, Svetlana Isakova, Egor Tolstoy, and Grace Kloba (VP of Engineering for Android Developer Experience at Google), to share exciting updates and future directions for the Kotlin language and its ecosystem. The conference also boasted a global reach with KotlinConf Global events held across 41 countries. For those unable to attend, the key announcements from the keynote are also available in a comprehensive blog post on the official Kotlin blog.

The keynote began by celebrating Kotlin’s impressive growth, with compelling statistics underscoring its widespread adoption, particularly in Android development where it stands as the most popular language, utilized in over 95% of the top 1000 Android applications. A significant emphasis was placed on the forthcoming Kotlin 2.0, which is centered around the revolutionary new K2 compiler. This compiler promises significant performance improvements, enhanced stability, and a robust foundation for the language’s future evolution. The K2 compiler is nearing completion and is slated for release as Kotlin 2.0. Additionally, the IntelliJ IDEA plugin will also adopt the K2 frontend, ensuring alignment with IntelliJ releases and a consistent developer experience.

The Evolution of Kotlin: K2 Compiler and Language Features

The K2 compiler was a central theme of the keynote, signifying a major milestone for Kotlin. This re-architected compiler frontend, which also powers the IDE, is designed to be faster, more stable, and to enable quicker development of new language features and tooling capabilities. Kotlin 2.0, built upon the K2 compiler, is set to bring these profound benefits to all Kotlin developers, improving both compiler performance and IDE responsiveness.

Beyond the immediate horizon of Kotlin 2.0, the speakers provided a glimpse into potential future language features that are currently under consideration. These exciting prospects included:

Prospective Language Enhancements

• Static Extensions: This feature aims to allow static resolution of extension functions, which could potentially improve performance and code clarity.
• Collection Literals: The introduction of a more concise syntax for creating collections, such as using square brackets for lists, with efficient underlying implementations, is on the cards.
• Name-Based Destructuring: Offering a more flexible way to destructure objects based on property names rather than simply their positional order.
• Context Receivers: A powerful capability designed to provide contextual information to functions in a more implicit and structured manner. This feature, however, is being approached with careful consideration to ensure it aligns well with Kotlin’s core principles and doesn’t introduce undue complexity.
• Explicit Fields: This would provide developers with more direct control over the backing fields of properties, offering greater flexibility in certain scenarios.

The JetBrains team underscored a cautious and deliberate approach to language evolution, ensuring that any new features are meticulously designed and maintainable within the Kotlin ecosystem. Compiler plugins were also highlighted as a powerful mechanism for extending Kotlin’s capabilities without altering its core.

Kotlin in the Ecosystem: Google’s Investment and Multiplatform Growth

Grace Kloba from Google took the stage to reiterate Google’s strong and unwavering commitment to Kotlin. She shared insights into Google’s substantial investments in the Kotlin ecosystem, including the development of Kotlin Symbol Processing (KSP) and the continuous emphasis on Kotlin as the default choice for Android development. Google officially championed Kotlin for Android development as early as 2017, a pivotal moment for the language’s widespread adoption. Furthermore, the Kotlin DSL is now the default for Gradle build scripts within Android Studio, significantly enhancing the developer experience with features such as semantic syntax highlighting and advanced code completion. Google also actively contributes to the Kotlin Foundation and encourages community participation through initiatives like the Kotlin Foundation Grants Program, which specifically focuses on supporting multiplatform libraries and frameworks.

Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) emerged as another major highlight of the keynote, emphasizing its increasing maturity and widespread adoption. The overarching vision for KMP is to empower developers to share code across a diverse range of platforms—Android, iOS, desktop, web, and server-side—while retaining the crucial ability to write platform-specific code when necessary for optimal integration and performance. The keynote celebrated the burgeoning number of multiplatform libraries and tools, including KMM Bridge, which are simplifying KMP development workflows. The future of KMP appears exceptionally promising, with ongoing efforts to further enhance the developer experience and expand its capabilities across even more platforms.

Compose Multiplatform and Emerging Technologies

The keynote also featured significant advancements in Compose Multiplatform, JetBrains’ declarative UI framework for building cross-platform user interfaces. A particularly impactful announcement was the alpha release of Compose Multiplatform for iOS. This groundbreaking development allows developers to write their UI code once in Kotlin and deploy it seamlessly across Android and iOS, and even to desktop and web targets. This opens up entirely new avenues for code sharing and promises accelerated development cycles for mobile applications, breaking down traditional platform barriers.

Finally, the JetBrains team touched upon Kotlin’s expansion into truly emerging technologies, such as WebAssembly (Wasm). JetBrains is actively developing a new compiler backend for Kotlin specifically targeting WebAssembly, coupled with its own garbage collection proposal. This ambitious effort aims to deliver high-performance Kotlin code directly within the browser environment. Experiments involving the execution of Compose applications within the browser using WebAssembly were also mentioned, hinting at a future where Kotlin could offer a unified development experience across an even broader spectrum of platforms. The keynote concluded with an enthusiastic invitation to the community to delve deeper into these subjects during the conference sessions and to continue contributing to Kotlin’s vibrant and ever-expanding ecosystem.

Links:

• Blog Post on KotlinConf’23 Keynote Highlights
• JetBrains Website
• JetBrains on LinkedIn
• Grace Kloba – KotlinConf’23 Speaker Profile

Hashtags: #Keynote #JetBrains #Google #K2Compiler #Kotlin2 #Multiplatform #ComposeMultiplatform #WebAssembly