Right. It's a better C, but it has to compete with C's ubiquity: there's make and cc on most *nix boxes.
JetBrains went out of their way to make migrating to Kotlin as easy as possible: you can literally upgrade your Java project file by file.
JetBrains went out of their way to make migrating to Kotlin as easy as possible: you can literally upgrade your Java project file by file.
https://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-cc-powerful-drop-in-replace...
As Java evolves and Kotlin needs to cater to Mountain View masters, upgrading the Java file won't be enough as many modern features don't exist on ART.
I think the first Kotlin version to use post-Java 9 bytecode is the Kotlin 1.4.20 using invokedynamic for string concatenation: https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2020/11/kotlin-1-4-20-rele...
Kotlin sealed classes are planned to be rendered as JVM sealed classes when JVM sealed classes go out of preview (probably Java 17), and the same is planned for mapping Kotlin value classes as Project Valhalla user-defined primitive types.
All these features obviously won't be available if you target Android, but they will still be there for you if you don't.
Faking JVM features on other platforms means that the performance is not the expected one when moving across them, and some surprises might happen when linking to libraries that use modern features.
Yes, offering a good path to switching (and conversely keeping the old voodoo part of the code no one wants to touch) is the way to go. And as I understand it, Zig offers this possibility as well.