Kotlin 1.3 released with stable coroutines, multiplatform projects and more

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In the Kotlin 1.3 release, coroutines are now stable, scalability is better, and Kotlin/Native Beta is added.

Coroutines are stable in Kotlin 1.3

Coroutines provide a way to write non-blocking asynchronous code that’s easy to understand. It is a useful tool for activities ranging from offloading work onto background workers to implementing complicated network protocols. The kotlinx.coroutines library hits is at 1.0. It provides a solid foundation for managing asynchronous jobs various scales including composition, cancelation, exception handling and UI-specific use cases.

Kotlin/Native Beta

Kotlin/Native makes use of LLVM to compile Kotlin sources into standalone binaries without any VM required. Various operating systems and CPU architectures including iOS, Linux, Windows, and Mac are supported. The support extends to even WebAssembly and embedded systems like STM32. Kotlin/Native has a fully automatic memory management and can interoperate with C, Objective-C, and Swift. It exposes platform APIs like Core Foundation, POSIX, and any other native library of choice.

The Kotlin/Native runtime promotes immutable data and blocks any attempts of sharing unprotected mutable state between threads. Threads don’t exist for Kotlin/Native, they are abstracted away as a low-level implementation. Threads are replaced by workers which are a safe and manageable way of achieving concurrency.

Multiplatform projects in Kotlin 1.3

Kotlin supports JVM, Android, JavaScript, and Native. Hence code can be reused. This saves effort and time which can be used to perform other tasks. The multiplatform libraries in Kotlin 1.3 cover everyday tasks such as HTTP, serialization and managing coroutines. Using the libraries is the easiest way to write multi platform code. You can also create custom multi-platform libraries which wrap platform-specific dependencies into a common API.

Tooling support for Kotlin/Native and Multiplatform

Kotlin 1.3 has tooling support for Kotlin/Native and multiplatform projects. This is available in IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, and Android Studio. All of the code editing features such as error highlighting, code completion, navigation and refactoring are available in all these IDEs.

Ktor 1.0 Beta

Ktor is a connected applications framework. It implements the entire HTTP stack asynchronously using coroutines and has reached Beta.

Other features

Some other features in Kotlin 1.3 release include experimental support for inline classes, incremental compilation for Kotlin/JS, and unsigned integers. This release also features a sequence debugger for visualizing lazy computations, contracts to improve static analysis for library calls, and no-arg entry point to provide a cleaner experience for new users.

To know more details about all the changes, visit the changelog.