Kotlin's interop experience has been important from the beginning. The language was born with the requirement of tight integration with existing JVM tooling. In this section, we'll explore why interop has always been integral to the Kotlin story and how it is achieved.
Understanding why Kotlin was designed with interop in mind
Why is interop so important for Kotlin?
As discussed in Chapter 1, A New Challenger Approaches, Kotlin was created by JetBrains, best known for creating terrific development tools such as IntelliJ IDEA. JetBrains has explicitly expressed several motivations for creating the language including the following:
- Wanting a more productive language for the JVM than what was then available with Java...