There have been 4 minor releases of Kotlin since 2.0 bringing stable and experimental features to the language and improvements to Java interoperability.

In this talk, we’ll highlight some of these particularly interesting for Backend JVM Developers, such as unused return value checks, explicit backing fields, name-based destructuring, collection literals, improved compile time constants and more.

We’ll also cover JVM ecosystem improvements such as simplified JPA support, Maven quality of life changes, the improved Lombok plugin, improved annotation handling and planned Java 28 support.

Finally, we’ll briefly touch on improvements made to the Kotlin Standard Library.