Kotlin

JetBrains, known as the maker of the IntelliJ Idea Java IDE appears set to add another language to the increasinly crowded field of Java Virtual Machine-based languages.

"We've looked at all of the existing JVM languages, and none of them meet our needs. Scala has the right features, but its most obvious deficiency is very slow compilation," said Dmitry Jeremov, JetBrains development lead.

The company said that while it knows how good Java is, it has limitations and problems that are "either impossible or very hard to fix due to backward-compatibility issues." JetBrains believes the community can benefit from a new statically typed JVM-targeted language "free of the legacy trouble and having the features so desperately wanted by the developers." JetBrains wants the object-oriented Kotlin language to be safer than Java, statically checking for pitfalls such as null pointer dereference, and more concise than Java. Another goal is to make it simpler than its "most mature competitor", Scala.

"Kotlin's purpose is to fix some of the problems that programmers have with Java," said analyst John Rymer. "Most of the features seem to be trying to simplify creation of complex applications and packing more power into each line of code."

The name "Kotlin" comes from an island near Saint Petersburg, Russia. JetBrains has research and development operations in the city.