[vorg]

> Kotlin is very reference semantics, itʼs a thin layer on top of Java

One of the main points of Kotlin is that it integrates tightly with IntelliJ. So Kotlin is a layer (not so thin) between a visual IDE (IntelliJ or Android Studio) and Java-decompilable bytecodes on the JVM.

You don't get that with other JVM languages, e.g. Apache Groovy only gives correct type hints in Eclipse 80% of the time, and JAD stopped working on Groovy-generated bytecodes in Groovy 1.7.

[nine_k]

Kotlin also happens to compile to JS and native code (using LLVM).

It's very wide use of lambdas with unique syntactic support for them makes it feel very different from Java.