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Don't forget about WASM as another platform; it's coming as well. An experimental version actually ships with 1.7; it's just a bit unstable and under documented
by jillesvangurp 4y ago
Don't forget about WASM as another platform; it's coming as well. An experimental version actually ships with 1.7; it's just a bit unstable and under documented and very much a work in progress.
I think Oracle is catching up slower than Kotlin has been evolving in terms of new language features. Most of the stuff they add to Java (including most of the stuff they are talking about adding), Kotlin has been doing for quite some time. Kotlin is pushing out minor releases about every 3-4 months and major ones pretty much every year. Basically, they do 2-3 minor versions in between major ones. The pace is relentless.
If anything, Kotlin could use an LTS release because it's actually getting hard to keep up with the ecosystem.
A slower pace might be helpful with that. The main issue with frequent releases is that many libraries take weeks or even months to update and don't necessarily work well (or at all) with newer Kotlin versions. I've had repeated issues with e.g. code generation plugins requiring specific version of Kotlin breaking because some other library suddenly requiring something newer. So that then starts blocking a lot of library updates. We've actually put some effort in unblocking some of this for some of the dependencies we have by creating pull requests.
But I'm excited about the next 1-2 years. I expect Kotlin native to stabilize and grow beyond just being a thing for IOS. I also expect wasm support will become usable in that time frame. I hope to be able to use it with WASI for edge networking or serverless stuff. And maybe even some command line tools. IMHO Kotlin has potential for data engineering as well. There is actually jupyter support for Kotlin. And some machine learning frameworks. It's becoming a proper full stack language.