
Kotlin 1.0 Release Candidate - miralabs
http://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2016/02/kotlin-1-0-release-candidate-is-out/
======
merb
Too bad that 1.0 will ship without something like Scala Future's. Now you can
only have a similar functionality with CompletableStage. It would've been way
better to actually have a similar implementation than scala.Future. I mean
they wouldn't need Quasar, Akka for basic stuff. However currently you need to
stick to Java pendants.

Kotlin has some great things, but overall I still prefer Scala over Kotlin for
anything not Android related.

I mean what I would've loved in 1.0:

    
    
        - specify Bytecode Level output 6, 7, 8, (9)
        - Futures
        - Macros (Big one especially for SQL Libraries really helpful)
        - Buildsystem supported by Jetbrains. 
        - Support for all major Java Build Systems directly by Jetbrains
    

However at the moment, kotlin feels like "here we developed a language which
we will use internally and we will do the stuff we need, for everything else,
do what you please", while most languages do this, the newer ones actually
coming with more stuff, ie. rust has a package manager, a build system (it
only lacks libraries, where kotlin wouldn't suffer, thanks to java), golang
which has also something like a package manager and a build system and a rich
library which has great support for "threading".

i mean on kotlin you could use maven or gradle. however maven is like:
<dosomething></dosomething> ugliness. and gradle is okai, but it feels wierd
sometimes especially since code highlighting in intellij always feels broken.

currently I'm way more looking forward at jetbrains c# project than on kotlin,
kotlin needs to evolve and get some libraries for major stuff. (btw. i'm not
totally against kotlin, however I thought 1.0 will bring a little bit more to
the table, which actually has more than just "faster" compile times than
scala, the jvm is rich and there a lot of great languages built on top of it
(even python, ruby, js works on it))

Edit Actually this author also has a good point about the good and the bad:
[http://natpryce.com/articles/000815.html](http://natpryce.com/articles/000815.html)

~~~
mike_hearn
There's a library that provides Scala-style futures here:

    
    
      http://kovenant.komponents.nl/
    

Although given Kotlin's transparent Java interop you can as well use Guava's
ListenableFuture which is quite good, or indeed CompletableFuture (which I
like less).

WRT build systems: both Maven and Gradle are fully supported in Kotlin, with
JetBrains provided plugins and IntelliJ knows how to work with them. So I am
not sure why you would want more here. You say there's a highlighting issue,
but I never saw such a thing, and wouldn't that be a minor IDE bug rather than
a reason to develop a new build/package manager from scratch?

Finally, Kotlin avoids macros (compiler plugins) by choice. The idea is the
built-in features let you customise the language enough without full blown AST
rewriting.

~~~
jpliska
There is a great build tool for Kotlin called Kobalt. It is quick, simple, and
levrages all of the available maven packages.

Other than being MUCH faster to compile than Scala, kotlin is also much easier
to read.

Also, Quasar is fantastic.

