Basically, Kotlin’s primary target is JVM but it may compile to native or JavaScript as well. JetBrains is responsible for the language development costs. On the other hand, Kotlin Foundation offers protection for the Kotlin trademark. Officially, Kotlin has Google’s backing for mobile development on the mobile OS giant Android. After the introduction of Android Studio 3.0 in 2017, the language has become a good alternative to the regular Java compiler. With this compiler, you can go for either Java 8 or Java 6 compatible bytecode.
In 2011, JetBrains introduced Project Kotlin, which is a fresh coding language for the popular JVM. According to Dmitry Jemerov, most languages didn’t have their desired features except Scala. Also, he said that the Scala has a shortcoming: it has a slow compilation time. The goal of Kotlin is to allow faster compilation like Java. In 2012, the project was marked open source by JetBrains under the license called Apache 2. JetBrains is hopeful that the language can drive the sales of IntelliJ IDEA. On February 15, Kotlin v1.0 was out. It is the first known stable release and features backward compatibility as well.