Oracle Java alternative Azul and developer tools specialist JetBrains have teamed up to accelerate runtimes across Kotlin workloads.
According to the announcement, the software companies have agreed a strategic technical collaboration to drive performance and scalability in web and server-side Kotlin applications.
“This strategic collaboration empowers Kotlin teams to accelerate development cycles and optimise application performance,” said Azul. “[Therefore] helping (organisations) support business priorities while driving operational efficiency.”
Azul bills itself as the only company 100% focused on Java.
JetBrains developed the Kotlin language as an Apache open-source project. Kotlin recently celebrated a 30 year anniversary.
Together, the partners are re-examining Kotlin-generated bytecode interactions with Java virtual machines (JVMs). As a result, they hope to uncover new ways to improve application performance.
This includes by combining Azul’s “deep expertise” in JVMs and application performance with Kotlin’s precise control over bytecode generation. This would involve the Azul Platform Prime solution, Azul said.
“The collaboration creates opportunity to optimise the entire execution stack,” the vendor added.
“While Kotlin is a cross-platform, general-purpose high-level programming language designed to interoperate fully with the JVM, runtime performance and scalability are derived predominantly from the JVM.”
How Kotlin workloads can benefit
Azul quoted TechEmpower web framework benchmarking. When comparing Kotlin applications on Azul Platform Prime versus “off the shelf” OpenJDK, the Azul offering was able to cut latencies by around 24%.
In addition, the Azul offering raised throughput by up to 30%, according to the vendor. Benchmarking methodology and results have been posted on JetBrains’ website – click here.
Vsevolod Tolstopyatov, Kotlin project lead, said Kotlin incorporated specific language features, such as inline functions and inline classes, that can assist performance.
“We’ve developed the Kotlin Coroutines library to facilitate concurrency and asynchronous programming, enabling efficient, scalable applications,” Tolstopyatov was quoted as saying.
“The JVM runtime is one of the most critical elements in application performance.”
Gil Tene, co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) at Azul, said the JetBrains tie-up would help Kotlin teams to boost devops as well as runtimes.
Azul Platform Prime could improve the execution of non-Kotlin JVM-based applications too, Tene said.
Meanwhile, JetBrains has introduced Koog, an open-source framework for building AI agents within the JVM ecosystem.
Subsequently, Daniela Bentrup and Olga Galchenko, writing for JetBrains, said developers now need tools to easily create autonomous agents.
“It’s a milestone in making Kotlin a first-class language for AI. We can’t wait to see what the community builds with it,” they said.
( Photo by Rosario Fernandes on Unsplash )
