What the release delivers is stable language features such as JVM records, sealed interfaces, online classes, and includes the new default JVM IR compiler.
More than 25,000 developers have already tried the new JVM IR compiler in IntelliJ IDEA.
The new compiler shares a unified pipeline and business logic with Kotlin/Native and Kotlin/JS IR compilers, which will allow developers to implement most features, optimizations, and bug fixes for all platforms simultaneously. It will also allow you to add custom processing and transformations that will automatically work on all platforms.
Auto-update to Kotlin 1.5.0
If you are a user of IntelliJ IDEA or Android Studio, it will give you the option to automatically update to the new Kotlin release as soon as it becomes available.
Stable language features
Kotlin 1.5.0 includes stable versions of the new language features presented for preview in 1.4.30:
Standard and test library improvements
The standard library provides many helpful features, including:
The test library comes with a set of important improvements:
Kotlin/JVM
Kotlin 1.5.0 brings the new JVM IR compiler, announced in Kotlin 1.4.0, becomes Stable and default. Compilation of Kotlin plain lambdas is Experimental, New default JVM target: 1.8. (the 1.6 target is deprecated), Improved handling of type nullability information from Java and Deprecation of @JvmDefault and old Xjvm-default modes.
Kotlin 1.5.0 provides support for compiler caches in debug mode for linuxX64 and iosArm64 targets. With compiler caches enabled, most debug compilations complete much faster, except for the first one. Kotlin 1.5.0 also provides deactivation of the built-in memory leak checker to avoid issues that may cause application crashes.
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