Since its release in 2011, Kotlin’s popularity among developers has grown thanks to its powerful features. A year ago, Google announced That Kotlin was the official Android development language, sparking a wave of migration from Java to Kotlin, according to more than 100,000 respondents on StackOverflow. Kotlin became the second most popular language, followed by Rust, a system programming language developed by Mozilla.

However, with the gradual development of technology, many developers have expressed frustration from Java to Kotlin, and then to Java, so what is the status of Kotlin?

In response, a foreign company called Pusher conducted an in-depth survey of 2,744 IT professionals worldwide from January to March this year based on Kotlin, and officially released The Report “The State of Kotlin 2018” yesterday. It shares how Kotlin is being used today and how the ecosystem is trending.

Next, we will introduce them one by one.

Younger developers love Kotlin

More than 70 percent of respondents were employees and 11 percent were entrepreneurs and developers.

They mainly work in technical jobs, followed by finance, education and digital agency. Insurance and government are among Kotlin’s most conservative applications.

More than half of respondents said they have worked as developers for less than five years, 33.9% for 2-5 years and 15.2% for 1-2 years. The respondents to this report had less work experience than the developers who participated in the StackOverflow survey. However, the conventional wisdom of “doubling the number of developers every five years” remains, and Kotlin will only have more developers in the future.

The number of developers using Kotlin in the enterprise varies widely, with about a third saying that 2-5 people in their company use Kotlin for development. That roughly matches the size of the team working on Android apps.

Kotlin is growing rapidly, but is not the language of choice for developers

Kotlin’s growth rate has been doubling every year, and by 2015 its use had seen its first big spike, from 1.4% the previous year to 7.7%. As for the reasons for the increase, And with Android from a great god must Jake Wharton document (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ReS3ep-hjxWA8kZi0YqDbEhCqTt29hG8P44aA9W0DM8), This document is intended to advocate using Kotlin for development and creates some popular Android open source libraries. This led many Android developers to follow suit and start building projects using Kotlin.

In May 2017, Google announced that Kotlin was officially available for Android, and as a result, 46.8% of Android developers started using Kotlin. Some of them are students drawn to Kotlin by the Google brand. According to the survey, Kotlin was primarily used by experienced professional developers in the early days, but is now being used by younger developers and students.

However, Java is still dominant, and many developers use other programming languages, such as JavaScript, Python, Swift, C#, etc., so most developers don’t use Kotlin as their first programming language.

Kotlin is used more for personal projects than corporate projects

More than 60% of respondents are using Kotlin in their work projects. By contrast, a third of the students surveyed used it for work and support projects. That is, nearly half of them said they intend to start using it in the future.

According to the survey, Kotlin’s official website is the number one source for getting started, followed by YouTube and Udemy courses and online conferences.

Kotlin is used more for personal projects than work projects.

Android is Kotlin’s killer app. When it comes to back-end applications, Kotlin is used by experienced developers, not by novices and students.

Favorite traits

Every Android developer who has used Java’s NullPointerException features will appreciate Kotlin’s security, followed by extension functions and Java interoperability. Seventy-seven percent of respondents said that Kotlin extensions tend to make code more readable, especially in functional programming environments or when creating DSLS.

In addition, over 87% of respondents converted existing Java code to Kotlin code. However, more than a quarter of developers regret migrating Java to Kotlin for technical and corporate reasons. Technical reasons include Kotlin’s reflection and code generation tools, as well as the following reasons:

Cross-platform Kotlin is making a comeback, but slowly. Only about a quarter of respondents mentioned that they use some kind of cross-platform support, with the majority choosing Kotlin/Native, followed by KotlinJS.

Some of Kotlin’s new functions and features, such as Coroutines, KotlinC, DSL, etc., were only used by a small number of respondents, who said that after all, these features are still not perfect.

The future of the Kotlin

The overall pace of Kotlin’s growth has many developers excited. We also believe it will continue to grow in popularity, given the support from JetBrains and Google, as well as the enthusiasm from the developer community. But the big question now is whether it will succeed beyond Android in the future.

JetBrains is now aggressively pushing Kotlin’s multi-platform app, and it’s unclear whether it will catch on. But it will probably take years to expand before it becomes the new standard for Web, iOS, and backend developers. According to the survey, more and more developers are taking their first steps in Kotlin programming, as well as moving between object-oriented, functional, and scripting. That’s enough to say that Kotlin is infiltrating the entire development ecosystem.

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