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In this guide we will discuss about what is Kotlin. This chapter provides basic and advanced concepts of Kotlin programming language. This chapter is designed for beginners and professionals both.

It is a statically-typed, general-purpose programming language. It is widely used to develop android applications.

Our Kotlin chaper includes all topics of Kotlin such as introduction, architecture, class, object, inheritance, interface, generics, delegation, functions, mixing Java and Kotlin, Java vs. Kotlin, etc.

What is Kotlin?

It is a new open source programming language like Java, JavaScript, Python etc. It is a high level strongly statically typed language that combines functional and technical part in a same place. Currently, It mainly targets the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), but also compiles to JavaScript.

It is influenced by other popular programming languages such as Java, C#, JavaScript, Scala and Groovy. The syntax of Kotlin may not be exactly similar to Java Programming Language, however, internally It is reliant on the existing Java Class library to produce wonderful results for the programmers. It provides interoperability, code safety, and clarity to the developers around the world.

It was developed and released by JetBrains in 2016. It is free, has been free and will remain free. It is developed under the Apache 2.0 license and the source code is available on GitHub.

Why Kotlin?

It is getting high popularity among all level of programmers and it is used for:

• Cross-platform Mobile applications.
• Android Application Development.
• Web Application Development
• Server Side Applications
• Desktop Application Development
• Data science based applications

It works on different platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Raspberry Pi, etc.) and it’s 100% compatible with Java.

It is used by many large companies like Google, Netflix, Slack, Uber etc to develop their Android based applications.

The most importantly, there are many companies actively looking for Kotlin developers, especially in the Android development space.

Features

• Concise: It reduces writing the extra codes. This makes Kotlin more concise.
• Null safety: It is null safety language. Kotlin aimed to eliminate the NullPointerException (null reference) from the code.Interoperable.
• Interoperable: It easily calls the Java code in a natural way as well as Kotlin code can be used by Java.
• Smart cast: It explicitly typecasts the immutable values and inserts the value in its safe cast automatically.
• Compilation Time: It has better performance and fast compilation time.
• Tool-friendly: It programs are build using the command line as well as any of Java IDE.
• Extension function: It supports extension functions and extension properties which means it helps to extend the functionality of classes without touching their code.

History

It was developed by JetBrains team. A project was started in 2010 to develop the language and officially, first released in February 2016. It was developed under the Apache 2.0 license.

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