What are coroutines in Kotlin?

Coroutines in Kotlin are like threads, but not quite like threads. They allow asynchronous computing. 

Their functionality is brought to bear from the library kotlinx.coroutines, developed by JetBrains. 

Put simply, a coroutine in Kotlin is a unit of suspendable computation Such a computation may be suspended in one thread, then reawoken in another thread. The keyword launch is used to launch a coroutine, and delay suspends the coroutine for a period of time, but does not hog the underlying thread.

What does it mean to use a library in "shaded form"?

Shaded form refers to using an open source library in a project but renaming the packages to avoid namespace collisions. For example, the ASM library is used in shaded form in Kotlin and Gradle.

The Kotlin Language

The Kotlin language is a statically typed language for the Android platform. It an also be used to build browser based systems. A Kotlin conference is scheduled in San Francisco in November 2017.