considered to be the first officially stable release and JetBrains has committed to long-term backwards compatibility starting with this version. At Google I/O 2017, Google announced first-class support for Kotlin on Android. Kotlin 1.2 was released on November 28, 2017. Sharing code between JVM and JavaScript platforms feature was newly added to this release (as of version 1.4 multiplatform programming is an alpha feature upgraded from "experimental"). A full-stack demo has been made with the new Kotlin/JS Gradle Plugin. Kotlin 1.3 was released on 29 October 2018, bringing coroutines for asynchronous programming. On 7 May 2019, Google announced that the Kotlin programming language is now its preferred language for Android app developers. Kotlin 1.4 was released in August 2020, with e.g. some slight changes to the support for Apple's platforms, i.e. to the Objective-C/Swift interop. Kotlin 1.5 was released in May 2021. Kotlin 1.6 was released in November 2021. Kotlin 1.7 was released in June 2022, including the alpha version of the new Kotlin K2 compiler. Kotlin 1.8 was released in December 2022. Design Development lead Andrey Breslav has said that Kotlin is designed to be an industrial-strength object-oriented language, and a "better language" than Java, but still be fully interoperable with Java code, allowing companies to make a gradual migration from Java to Kotlin. Semicolons are optional as a statement terminator; in most cases a newline is sufficient for the compiler to deduce that the statement has ended. Kotlin variable declarations and parameter lists have the data type come after the variable name (and with a colon separator), similar to Ada, BASIC, Pascal, TypeScript and Rust. This, according to an article from Roman Elizarov, current project lead, results in alignment of variable names and is more pleasing to eyes especially when there are a few variable declarations in succession and one or more of the types is too complex for type inference or needs to be declared explicitly for human readers to understand. Variables in Kotlin can be read-only, declared with the keyword, or mutable, declared with the keyword. Class members are public by default, and classes themselves are final by default, meaning that creating a derived class is disabled unless the base class is declared with the keyword. In addition to the classes and member functions (which are equivalent to methods) of object-oriented programming, Kotlin also supports procedural programming with the use of functions. Kotlin functions and constructors