JetBrains has released Kotlin 1.4.30 with new experimental features that are planned to be stable for Kotlin 1.5, currently in milestone release and scheduled for GA release in mid-2021. Considered the last incremental version of Kotlin 1.4.x, these new features include: a new JVM internal representation (IR) compiler backend, support for Java records and sealed interfaces, and configuration cache support for the Kotlin Gradle Plugin. JetBrains is encouraging the Kotlin community to test these new features, especially the new JVM IR backend, in their applications using Kotlin 1.4.30 and report any bugs using their YouTrack issue tracker.

Complementing the compiler frontend, responsible for analyzing the source code, the new JVM IR backend, currently in beta, will be the default compiler in Kotlin 1.5. It is composed of three separate backends: Kotlin/JVM, Kotlin/JS and Kotlin/Native. The first two, having been developed independently, will be integrated into the new JVM IR infrastructure within Kotlin/Native.

Changes with the new backend include: a number of bug fixes that were present in the old backend and the development of new language features to improve performance. Android’s new toolkit for building UIs, Jetpack Compose, will only work with the new backend.

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