Since the start of the year, Canonical has been announcing that popular apps such as Skype, the messenger Slack, and the streaming service Spotify, are available as snap packages. Now the company has announced that the modern programming language, Kotlin, can now be installed from a snap package on the open source operating system too.
Jamie Bennett, VP of Engineering, Devices and IoT at Canonical, said:
“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.”
With this development, JetBrains, which maintains Kotlin, has made it easy for users to grab the latest versions of Kotlin, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, and other IDEs in the JetBrains portfolio. It’ll make developers’ lives much easier because they’ll no longer have to start downloading out-of-repository software in order to start using the latest tools.
The Kotlin snap works natively on all Linux distributions that support snaps, including Linux Mint, Manjaro, Debian, Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, Solus, and as we’ve already mentioned, Ubuntu. Snaps allow developers to push automatic updates out to their software, roll-back features, and offer users more security benefits. You can find the Kotlin snap here.
Source: Ubuntu Insights