Wrapping Up

Kotlin is a language of choices, and that spirit shines from the beginning with support for multiple programming paradigms and a number of options for executing Kotlin code. Kotlin doesn’t dictate how you should write applications. You can start small, with just a few lines to build scripts, and you can ask the language to take you all the way to build highly complex applications with classes and dependencies. You can use Kotlin to build server-side applications, optionally with Spring. You can create Android applications, transpile Kotlin to JavaScript, and also using Kotlin/Native to compile to targeted native platforms like iOS and WebAssembly. Kotlin’s versatile nature makes it one of the few full-stack programming languages.

You may compile to Java bytecode and run within the JVM. Alternatively, you can run it as a script, skipping the extra compilation step. If you’re into front-end development, you may get compile-time safety along with all the benefits of Kotlin to transpile the code into JavaScript. And to explore small snippets of code, you can use the Kotlin REPL.

In this chapter, you gained some high-level insights into the capabilities of Kotlin and got up and running with it.

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In the next lesson, you’ll learn the fundamentals of the language that you’ll use every day when programming with Kotlin.