JetBrains announced the release of Kotlin version 1.3

JetBrains team announced Kotlin version 1.3 release. The developers stabilized the coroutine’s work and introduced the Kotlin / Native beta. The language is now supported by the Google Cloud Platform, the Spring framework and the Gradle system.

New in Kotlin 1.3

◊ Library release kotlinx.coroutines version 1.0 for working with coroutines.

◊Beta release of Kotlin / Native – LLVM backend for compiling the source Kotlin-code into separate binaries. The new version provides fully automated memory management and is able to interact with C, Objective-C and Swift. In addition, the Kotlin / Native runtime promotes the use of immutable data and prevents any attempts to share unprotected changeable code in threads.

◊New libraries to support multiplatform projects. In addition to kotlinx.coroutines for coroutines, the JetBrains team presented libraries for handling HTTP requests and serialization. You can create such a tool yourself by adding dependencies specific to the platform to the public API.

◊Support for innovations introduced in Kotlin 1.3 in three IDEs: IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and Android Studio.

◊Implementation of “contracts”

◊Experimental support for inline classes and four subspecies of the unsigned integer type.

◊Ability of nested ads in annotation classes.

◊Inclusion in the standard support library Kotlin / Native and Kotlin / JS.

You can read more about Kotlin 1.3 on What’s New page on the Kotlin website. Many innovations presented by developers on KotlinConf: a playlist with performances is available on the YouTube-channel JetBrains.

The previous version, Kotlin 1.2, was released in November 2017. She suggested compiling both in JVM bytecode and in JavaScript for using the language in both the frontend and backend. In that version, the compiler was significantly optimized, the standard library was replenished with new packages, and extensions for working with sequences and collections appeared.