Kotlin 1.4 release was announced to the developer community with a strong focus on improving quality, performance, new features, and tooling.
Kotlin 1.4 release was made available to the developer community a couple of weeks ago with a strong focus on improving quality-of-life and performance as well as new features.
Kotlin, which is very popular in Android development is a programming language best known as a better version of Java that can compile to either Java bytecode and native code, as well as transpile to JavaScript.
This release comes with improved IDE performance and stability, including freezes or memory leaks, all these making Kotlin 1.4 up to four times faster.
autocomplete suggestions now appear much faster in IntelliJ IDEA 2020.1+ and Android Studio 4.1+.
Other highlights of the Kotlin 1.4 release includes some features of their new compiler, most notably a new and more powerful type inference algorithm, and new JVM and JS backends.
As for language features this release now has SAM (Single Abstract Method) conversions for Kotlin interfaces, explicit API mode for library authors that allows the compiler to perform additional checks that help make the library’s API clearer and more consistent.
Mixing named and positional arguments where you can now specify a name for an argument in the middle of a set of positional arguments. Moreover, you can mix positional and named arguments any way you like, as long as they remain in the correct order.
Trailing commas are now supported in enumerations such as argument and parameter lists.
Callable reference improvements in references to functions with default argument values and function references in Unit-returning functions. References that adapt based on the number of arguments in a function, suspend conversion on callable references, and while using break and continue inside when in loops.
Within the library, platform dependencies are now added by default be they Android & iOS or JVM & JS.
You can find detailed descriptions of new features of the Kotlin 1.4 release on the official release page here, or you can get a summary on the Kotlin announcement page here.
Found this article interesting? Follow Brightwhiz on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to read and watch more content we post.