Software development tools company JetBrains s.r.o. today announced the milestone release of Kotlin 2.0, a major update to the programming language used on Android and for multiplatform development.

Announced during KotlinConf 2024, the new stable 2.0 version was rewritten from scratch and based on a new architecture that significantly improves performance and will help boost developer productivity, according to JetBrains. The company added that compilation time of projects on K2 are up to two times faster on the new compiler than Kotlin 1.9.20.

“Currently, 2 million developers use Kotlin for any task you can imagine: from creating beautiful multiplatform apps to Minecraft mods to performant server-side apps to ground-breaking LLM-based tools,” said Egor Tolstoy, Kotlin project lead at JetBrains. “The new compiler architecture was built to enable us to evolve the language much easier, we can introduce new features faster and in a consistent and platform-agnostic way.”

In May 2019, Google LLC announced that Kotlin was the preferred programming language for its Android operating system, which powers the company’s line of mobile and laptop devices. 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 integrate with Java and compile into JavaScript for frontend web applications, or native code to drive native iOS applications sharing logic with Android apps.

More than 15,000 developers participated in the preview of Kotlin 2.0, including companies such as Meta Platforms Inc., which have already migrated large parts of their codebases over to the new language paradigm. As of today’s release, it’s safe to begin migrating to it.

JetBrains also improved the tooling for Kotlin Multiplatform, a way to reuse code across operating system environments, with a single all-in-one tool built on the Fleet platform. Fleet is a lightweight independent development environment for developers, now in preview, who want to be able to open up a coding project quickly and get down to basics with a clean user interface and experience. 

With the new multiplatform 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 who write platform-specific code for iOS will get full support from the code editor, including inspections, navigation and refactoring that will also work across languages.

Open-source Kotlin dataset for LLMs and AI apps

Coming with the release of Kotlin 2.0 is the open-source Kotlin dataset, together with the 7B Kotlin Language model, which will help the creators of large language models and artificial intelligence code generation tools improve how they work.

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

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