How would a Kotlin notebook work when kotlin is a compiled language?

Question

I tried the Kotlin notebook extension and I wonder what is going under the hood.
I have used notebooks with python and because python is an interpreted language it seems natural that it works in the notebook.

My understanding is that after writing the Kotlin code I need to compile it (No?) before I execute it. But in notebook, if I create a class in one cell, I am able to instantiate an object in the next cell and I can't figure out how is this working.

EDIT: It appears there are IPYTHON kernels for many of the compiled languages. However the question remains "How do compiled programming languages work in the interactive jupyter notebook environment"?

Answer 1

Kotlin has a special scripting mode (apart from the ordinary compiled mode), we often name a Kotlin script with the suffix .kts.

You can try this with a command line Kotlin compiler:

• Write println("hello world") in a.kts
• Run kotlinc -script a.kts

And you'll see hello world printed on screen.

If you have IntelliJ IDEA, try right-clicking on a .kts file and select Run option. You'll see command line output.

How do compiled programming languages work in the interactive jupyter notebook environment?

There's nothing to do with "compiled" here. This is a special function of Kotlin compiler (running kotlin codes as script).
Not all languages have such feature. This isn't general-purpose.