Getting started with Kotlin

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Version	Release Date
1	Feb 15, 2016
1	Mar 16, 2016
1	May 13, 2016
1	Jun 30, 2016
1	Sep 22, 2016
1	Nov 08, 2016
1	Dec 27, 2016
1.1	Mar 01, 2017
1.1	Mar 14, 2017
1.1	Apr 25, 2017
1.1	Jun 23, 2017

Remarks

Kotlin is a statically-typed object-oriented programming language developed by JetBrains primarily targeting the JVM. Kotlin is developed with the goals of being quick to compile, backwards-compatible, very type safe, and 100% interoperable with Java. Kotlin is also developed with the goal of providing many of the features wanted by Java developers. Kotlin’s standard compiler allows it to be compiled both into Java bytecode for the JVM and into JavaScript.

Compiling Kotlin

Kotlin has a standard IDE plugin for Eclipse and IntelliJ. Kotlin can also be compiled using Maven, using Ant, and using Gradle, or through the command line.

It is worth noting in $ kotlinc Main.kt will output a java class file, in this case MainKt.class (Note the Kt appended to the class name). However if one was to run the class file using $ java MainKt java will throw the following exception:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: kotlin/jvm/internal/Intrinsics
    at MainKt.main(Main.kt)
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: kotlin.jvm.internal.Intrinsics

at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:381) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:424) at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:335) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:357) … 1 more

In order to run the resulting class file using Java, one must include the Kotlin runt-time jar file to the current class path.

java -cp .:/path/to/kotlin/runtime/jar/kotlin-runtime.jar MainKt

Found a mistake? Have a question or improvement idea? Let me know.

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