Java-alternative Kotlin now available as open source
JetBrains' alternative language for the Java platform, Kotlin – which the company has been developing since 2010 and revealed in July 2011 – has now been released as open source under an Apache 2 licence. The released tools include the Kotlin compiler, "Kompiler", a set of enhancements to standard Java libraries such as convenience utilities for JDK collections, build tools (for Ant, Maven and Gradle), and an IntelliJ IDEA plugin so it works with JetBrains' own IDE.
Kotlin, the language, is a statically typed programming language which can be compiled to Java JVM byte code or to JavaScript. It was designed to be safer than Java with static checking for problems such as null pointer dereferencing, and more concise than Java by including type inference, higher-order functions, mixins and delegation.
