Kotlin 1.4 has been released

Here's what’s included in Kotlin 1.4.0:

• By default, a new, more powerful type inference algorithm is enabled. It automatically infers types in more cases, supports smart casting even in complex scenarios, handles delegated properties better, and much more.
• New IR backends for JVM and JS are available in alpha mode. Once stabilized, they will be used by default.

Kotlin 1.4 has a lot of new features:

• SAM conversions for Kotlin interfaces
• Explicit API mode for library authors
• Mixed named and positional arguments
• Trailing comma
• Improvements for callable references
• Using break and continue inside when loops

Standard library improvements:

The main focus of work on the Kotlin standard library is to enhance consistency across different platforms and among operations themselves. This release adds new collection operators, improvements for delegated properties, implementation of the bidirectional queue ArrayDeque and and much more.

Additionally, there's no need to declare a dependency on stdlib
in Gradle Kotlin projects, whether you are developing for a single platform or creating a multiplatform project. Starting from Kotlin 1.4.0, this dependency is added by default.

Work on other parts of the Kotlin ecosystem continues:

• kotlinx.coroutines
• The serialization library is approaching maturity. It introduces kotlinx.serialization in version 1.0.0-RC.
• A preview version of the DateTime API has been released, an experimental library kotlinx-datetime

Details

We invite everyone to a four-day online conference dedicated to Kotlin 1.4!

The event will be streamed from October 12 to 15. Free registration is available at the link: https://kotlinlang.org/lp/event-14#registration

Source: linux.org.ru