Popular programming language Kotlin arrives as a snap for Ubuntu
Canonical has announced that the modern programming language, Kotlin, is now available as a snap package for Ubuntu. Over the past couple of months, Canonical has also announced snap packages for the popular music streaming service Spotify, and apps such as Slack and Skype.
Developed by JetBrains, Kotlin is a universal development language that runs on the top of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and works across all major tools and services such as GitHub, Slack, Android Studio, Spring, Vert.x and even Minecraft to name a few.
“In choosing Snapcraft, JetBrains continues to show confidence in a platform that enables Kotlin and Java developers to bring their software to tens of millions of Linux users. Kotlin is proving extremely popular and adding it to the wealth of developer-focused snaps already available providers an incredibly powerful platform to produce and distribute software,” said Jamie Bennett, VP of Engineering, Devices and IoT at Canonical.
Since Snaps are containerised software packages, it allows users to keep the complete package up to date with almost zero effort.
“We believe the main advantage of using Snapcraft to install Kotlin for the development community is that developers don’t have to care about all the required dependencies (like JDK) as well as about future updates”, says Aleksey Rostovskiy, Engineer at JetBrains. “With snap packages, developers can seamlessly install Kotlin and all the required dependencies just once and from then on the update process happens in the background, so they always stay on the latest version available”.
The Kotlin snap will work natively on all Linux distributions that support snaps, including Linux Mint, Manjaro, Debian, Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, Solus and Ubuntu. Besides offering greater flexibility for developers, Snaps also allow them to push automatic updates to their software, roll-back features, and offer security benefits to users.
To install Kotlin as a snap click here or you can run snap install kotlin –classic on any system with snap support enabled.
Source: Ubuntu Insights, Neowin
