JetBrains officially announces Kotlin 2.0: completely rewriting the front-end architecture of the compiler from scratch, doubling the compile speed

etBrains officially announced Kotlin 2.0 at KotlinConf 2024 today.

The main change in Kotlin 2.0 is the introduction of the K2 compiler, which improves performance. The official introduction previously stated that the K2 compiler front-end is not a refactoring of the old compiler front-end, but a complete rewrite from scratch based on the new architecture.

The development team stated that they have tried to minimize the number and impact of destructive changes, so during the development phase, they will “consciously avoid introducing any new features in Kotlin 2.0” and “do their best to minimize the impact of migrating code from Kotlin 1.9 to Kotlin 2.0”.

Kotlin 2.0 brings many exciting new features, including faster compile speeds, smarter code analysis, and multi-platform support implemented from scratch.

According to JetBrains, Kotlin was originally a JVM language that quickly gained popularity among developers for its simplicity and security. With big companies like AWS, Adobe, Atlassian, and Google adopting Kotlin, it has quickly gained recognition on the server side. Kotlin has become the primary language for Android…