Gradle Inc. Joins Kotlin Foundation as First New Member Since Founding by Google and JetBrains

April 13, San Francisco, CA. – At KotlinConf 2023 in Amsterdam today, Gradle Inc. was announced as a member of the Kotlin Foundation. Gradle has the distinction of being selected as the Foundation’s first new member since its founding by Google and JetBrains in 2017. As a member of the Kotlin Foundation, Gradle will help accelerate the development of the Kotlin ecosystem and promote the use of Kotlin as a tool for education and industry.

“We look forward to collaborating even more closely with Gradle on language and ecosystem development and promotion,” said Jeffrey van Gogh, Secretary of the Kotlin Foundation’s Board of Directors. “As the creator of the most widely-used build tool for Kotlin, Gradle is a longtime supporter of the language and we’re thrilled to have deepened our partnership with this announcement.”

“At Gradle, we’re on a mission to provide a common productivity platform across all build and language ecosystems,” said Hans Dockter, Gradle Inc. co-founder and CEO. “I’m excited to advance Gradle’s relationship with the Kotlin community in pursuit of our vision.”

As a Silver Member of the Kotlin Foundation, Gradle will have the opportunity to provide guidance to the maintainers of open-source projects, contribute to committees and workgroups, and contribute to the Foundation’s overall strategy. Specifically, Gradle will have an opportunity to support initiatives including the grants program for open-source library authors and the Kotlin Multiplatform Contest for students. The grants program supports open-source library authors in the Kotlin community, while the Kotlin Multiplatform Contest encourages students to use Kotlin Multiplatform to develop their apps.

Gradle’s long history of collaborating with JetBrains on Kotlin development dates back to 2015 when the two companies embarked on a plan to bring a Kotlin-based approach to writing Gradle build scripts and plugins, called Kotlin DSL. This resulted in a much better build authoring experience by bringing full IDE assistance to editing build logic. 

Gradle is also a silver sponsor at this year’s KotlinConf, the official conference of the Kotlin programming language. Visit kotlinconf.com for free access to the KotlinConf livestream and tune into a Gradle-led session on April 14, 3:15 p.m. CEST: “One language to build them all!” In this talk Paul Merlin, lead software engineer at Gradle, and Rodrigo Oliveria, senior principal software engineer at Gradle, will explore how Kotlin fits the Gradle programming model, how to use Kotlin to extend the Gradle DSL, how to write convention plugins in Kotlin, and how to interact with and configure the Kotlin Gradle plugin.

To learn more about the Kotlin Foundation, visit https://kotlinfoundation.org/. 

About Gradle
Gradle Inc. is the company behind the popular open-source Gradle Build Tool, which is downloaded over 30 million times a month, and the provider of the leading software solution for improving developer productivity and happiness called Develocity. Gradle is also pioneering the emerging practice of Developer Productivity Engineering. Elite development teams from companies like ASML, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Nasdaq, SAP, and Netflix, practice DPE to deliver quality software more rapidly at scale. They achieve this by leveraging Develocity’s innovative build and test performance acceleration technologies and analytics to proactively improve the reliability of the developer toolchain and make failure troubleshooting more efficient. 

About Kotlin Foundation
The Kotlin Foundation is a non-profit organization with the mission to promote and advance the Kotlin ecosystem. The Foundation preserves Kotlin trademarks, controls incompatible changes to the Kotlin language, appoints the lead language designer, supports open-source projects and promotes Kotlin education initiatives globally.