Kotlin
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These questions were only shown to respondents who chose Kotlin as one of their three primary programming languages.
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The number of Kotlin users with more than four years of experience continues to grow and has almost tripled since 2021. At the same time, there is a significant increase in the number of people using Kotlin for less than six months. The combination of these trends indicates that more and more developers are starting to learn Kotlin and staying with it for longer.
Enrique López-Mañas
Founder of Kotlin Weekly and Google Developer Expert
May 2019 marked a milestone in the usage of Kotlin. I vividly remember when Kotlin was announced at the Google I/O as the preferred language for Android developers. It changed the software development experience for a generation of developers.
Kevin Galligan
Technology Partner at Touchlab, Kotlin GDE, Open-Source Contributor, and Conference Speaker
It’s nice to see both a rise in new Kotlin devs and a steady growth in the number of devs who have been using Kotlin for several years at this point.
The majority of Kotlin developers use the language for Android and/or server-side applications. However, the share of multiplatform development on Kotlin has been showing steady growth during recent years.
Enrique López-Mañas
Founder of Kotlin Weekly and Google Developer Expert
Kotlin has evolved from a primarily Android-focused language into a general-purpose language with a thriving ecosystem, especially on the server side. It has become a first-class citizen language, rivaling other big players in the industry.
Kevin Galligan
Technology Partner at Touchlab, Kotlin GDE, Open-Source Contributor, and Conference Speaker
For a long time, Kotlin was mostly viewed as the “Android language”, but adoption on the server in particular has been significant and amazing to watch. KMP for mobile development has been growing steadily, and we’re really hoping that will pick up as the platform moves from Beta to Stable. In the coming years, I’m looking forward to seeing Wasm development with Kotlin grow significantly.
IntelliJ IDEA, be it the Ultimate or Community Edition, is the go-to IDE for Kotlin development.
Enrique López-Mañas
Founder of Kotlin Weekly and Google Developer Expert
Before Android Studio (an IDE based on IntelliJ IDEA), the development experience for Android was quite fragmented. Android Studio has significantly improved the quality of work for Android and Kotlin.
Kevin Galligan
Technology Partner at Touchlab, Kotlin GDE, Open-Source Contributor, and Conference Speaker
I would expect this trend to continue as more Kotlin development is done outside of Android. I am curious to see next year’s numbers for Fleet.
Kevin Galligan
Technology Partner at Touchlab, Kotlin GDE, Open-Source Contributor, and Conference Speaker
I don't have any concrete numbers, but at least a few larger teams we've talked with mentioned the lack of (official) Bazel support as an issue. Understanding if these are outliers or if Bazel use is growing significantly would be valuable.
kotlinx.coroutines and kotlinx.serialization remain the top Kotlin libraries and tools for the fourth year in a row. One-third of Kotlin developers use Ktor in their work.
The popularity of Compose Multiplatform continues to grow, with 22% of Kotlin developers already using this modern declarative framework for sharing UIs across multiple platforms, including desktop, web, Android, and iOS. Check out this video tutorial by Sebastian Aigner to learn more about Compose Multiplatform.
Enrique López-Mañas
Founder of Kotlin Weekly and Google Developer Expert
One aspect I like from JetBrains is its involvement in the Kotlin ecosystem. JetBrains doesn’t only work on Kotlin as a language, but also provides a really nice ecosystem covering most of the aspects we need. For me, it is living proof that JetBrains is committed to making Kotlin successful.
Kevin Galligan
Technology Partner at Touchlab, Kotlin GDE, Open-Source Contributor, and Conference Speaker
I’m very surprised to see Compose Multiplatform at 22%. It is something we’re very much looking forward to using more in the future, but it is somewhat new. It’s great to see that growth!
Enrique López-Mañas
Founder of Kotlin Weekly and Google Developer Expert
I believe I'm not alone in the assessment that all of us who were using Java before were advanced a decade by the advent of Kotlin.
Kevin Galligan
Technology Partner at Touchlab, Kotlin GDE, Open-Source Contributor, and Conference Speaker
These results are not a huge surprise, of course, but hopefully with KMP, some of these numbers will grow in the years to come.
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