An overview of the

Today, the official Kotlin blog officially announced Kotlin 1.3, along with some open source libraries, build tools, and learning resources. Kotlin 1.3 Released with Coroutines, Kotlin/Native Beta, and More

According to the official announcement, this update brings with it a Kotlin/Native Beta, coroutines, multi-platform code reuse, and a variety of learning kits. In this update, Coroutines have been stabilized, making non-blocking code easy to read and write. Kotlin 1.3 also brings the Kotlin/Native Beta, which compiles Kotlin code directly into Native binaries. In addition, Kotlin’s cross-platform capabilities allow business logic to be shared between components such as Android and iOS applications, servers to share logic with Web and mobile clients, and multi-platform libraries make day-to-day development easier.

According to a recent Stack Overflow survey, about 1.5 million developers are using Kolin programming, double the number a year ago, and Kotlin is gaining popularity in mobile Android and Java backend development. The Kotlin open Source community has created a number of outstanding libraries with names such as RxKotlin, Mockito-Kotlin, TornadoFX, Kodein and λ RROW. Projects such as Square’s Okio and LibreOffice have begun to migrate to Kotlin, indicating that the Kotlin ecosystem is maturing.

New Feature Interpretation

According to the official document, this update mainly includes the following aspects:

Coroutines

Coroutines is a new asynchronous API introduced in Kotlin 1.1. It is a powerful tool that has been in the experimental stage until now, but in the latest version 1.3, the Coroutines syntax and the standard library API have been stabilized and you can use it with confidence.

Read more: kotl.in/coroutines

Kotlin / Native Beta

Kotlin/Native uses LLVM to compile Kotlin source code into separate binaries (no VM required), which is suitable for a variety of operating systems and CPU architectures, This includes iOS, Linux, Windows, Mac and even WebAssembly and embedded systems such as STM32, which has fully automatic memory management and supports interoperability with C, Objective-C (and Swift).

For details, please read: kotlinlang.org/docs/refere…

Multi-platform projects and tools

According to Kotlin’s team, running on all platforms is Kotlin’s goal, but the only way to get there is to share code across multiple platforms, with support for JVMS, Android, JavaScript, and Native, Kotlin can now handle any component of a modern application. While Kotlin’s multi-platform capabilities are still experimental, version 1.3 is a big step forward.

Kotlin 1.3 also ships with a set of multi-platform libraries that cover everyday tasks such as HTTP, serialization, and collaborative management. The easiest way to write multiplatform code is to rely on these libraries, and you can also create your own multiplatform libraries that wrap platform-specific dependencies into a common API.

For details, please read: kotlinlang.org/docs/refere…

Other features

Other new features include:

  • Support for inline classes
  • Unsigned integers are supported
  • Support incremental Kotlin/JS compilation
  • Library support is extended to Kotlin/Native, etc