Kotlin 1.3.60 released with Kotlin Worksheets, support for the new Kotlin/Native targets and other updates

Kotlin 1.3.60 was released yesterday with new features, as well as quality and tooling improvements. This release adds support for more Kotlin/Native platforms and targets. It also improves the Kotlin/MPP IDE experience. For Kotlin/JS, Kotlin 1.3.60 adds support for source maps and improves the platform test runner integration. The team has also significantly enhanced some “create expect” quick-fixes to the multiplatform side of Kotlin.

IntelliJ IDEA and Kotlin Eclipse IDE plugin updates

• Scratch files are now redesigned and improved to let you see the results, which are shown in a different window.
• The Kotlin team is working on enhancing the user experience with Kotlin Gradle build scripts.
• Developers can set function breakpoints in the Kotlin code. The debugger will then stop execution on entering or exiting the corresponding function.
• Multiple improvements to Java-to-Kotlin converter.
• The kotlin-eclipse plugin now supports experimentally incremental compilation for single modules.

Improvements to Kotlin/Native compiler in Kotlin 1.3.60

• The Kotlin/Native compiler has compatibility with the latest tooling bits: XCode 11 and LLVM 8.0. It also adds new platforms/targets such as watchOS, tvOS, and Android (native).
• Kotlin 1.3.60 adds experimental symbolication of iOS crash reports for release binaries (including LLVM-inlined code, which is one step further than what XCode is able to decode).
• Thread-safe tracking of Objective-C weak/shared references to Kotlin objects.
• Support for suspend callable references.
• The ability to associate a work queue with any context/thread, not just the ones created ad⁠-⁠hoc through Worker.start.
• The kotlinx.cli project has been (mostly) rewritten and is included in this release of the Kotlin/Native compiler.
• The runtime performance of Kotlin/Native compiler has also been improved: interface calls are now up to 5x faster, and type checks up to 50x faster in Kotlin 1.3.60.

The team has also shared upcoming changes planned for Kotlin 1.4 which is to be released in 2020. Currently, Kotlin 1.4 is available in the experimental state. You can find the complete list of Kotlin 1.3.60 changes in the changelog.

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