Nine Highlights from the Kotlin Roadmap
Many of you want to know about Kotlin’s future and what lies ahead. We often talk about the upcoming new compiler, focus on tooling quality and performance, and server-side and KMM experience, but the talks usually don’t give the full picture.
If you want to stay up to date and follow all of the team’s plans, review the Kotlin public roadmap. We’ve just updated it to reflect our plans for 2021 and beyond! This update covers how the language, tooling, and ecosystem will evolve in the upcoming year. You can choose whether to explore the updated roadmap yourself or check out nine notable highlights in this blog post.
The new Kotlin compiler is a huge project that consists of rewriting the JVM and JS backends together with the frontend to the new architecture. When fully completed, the project should bring significant performance benefits, enable compiler plugin API support, and give us the opportunity to create new language features. We’ve just released the new JVM backend part of the compiler, and now we’re focusing on other pieces.
To get the performance boost, we need the new compiler frontend. We’ve been actively working on it for some time and are getting close to the Alpha release. At first, it’s going to support only the JVM target and work only on a specific subset of projects. When enabled explicitly, the new frontend will double the compilation speed!
