Kotlin for JavaScript

I&#x27;d be more interested if there was VSCode support. The JetBrains folks response was ridiculous and dismissive: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.kotlinlang.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;official-support-for-visual-studio-code&#x2F;8242" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.kotlinlang.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;official-support-for-visual...</a><p>Apparently they refuse to support the most popular web IDE because Kotlin for JS is really about selling IDEA licenses. Fair enough, but it means I don&#x27;t suggest Kotlin for anything except as a Java alternative and Android.<p>There&#x27;s better options from companies that are less adversarial to their community.

We use Kotlin JS in production and like it quite well. It enabled us to easily share code with the Kotlin backend and Typescript frontend. Kotlin also generates Typescript type definitions which enables us to easily call those Kotlin methods from typescript. The multiplatform vision allows us to compile&#x2F;share natively code for mobile platforms too.<p>I also love to see the quickly evolving Jetpack Compose which would enable to write natively executed UI code on most major platforms. (iOS is not there yet and likely depends on new memory model which is currently being developed.)

One of our lead developers at work pushed this for a rush demo job last week (he’s a Kotlin advocate). He spent the week fighting with lack of documentation and has now given up and reverted to plain old javascript.<p>I’d just use Clojurescript.

My problem with this is that it’s absolutely unclear to me how to even get started. The whole Java landscape is full of magic to me.<p>Getting started with node is a matter of downloading a single binary, writing one js file, and executing it with said binary.<p>Upgrading that to Typescript is a matter of downloading another binary, and running the two in sequence.<p>Conversely, Java feels like I have to develop a whole program just to get my program to run.

This might be more appealing to programmers outside the Java ecosystem if it didn&#x27;t depend on Gradle.

My project is a programming language interpreted, and from the start it was written in multiplatform Kotlin. Then als to this it was trivial to create a web frontend where the entire implementation runs in the browser. All of this is done without a single line of Javascript, which helps in reducing the pain of web development.<p>The primary implementation is running on the JVM, but almost all code is also reusable in the web version.<p>It&#x27;s all open source so anyone that is curious about how this looks like in an actual project is freelance to have a look here. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kapdemo.dhsdevelopments.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kapdemo.dhsdevelopments.com</a>

pron wrote an insightful comment on Kotlin’s future sometime ago, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24197817" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24197817</a>. He has actively commented on Kotlin this past decade in good faith. The key quote:<p>&gt; Kotlin&#x27;s design goals are now contradictory. It seeks to be a low-overhead language, i.e. provide abstractions that don&#x27;t add overhead over the target platform, give access to all platform capabilities, and at the same time target multiple platforms -- Java, Android, LLVM and JS -- over none of which does Kotlin exert much influence (maybe a bit on Android).<p>I agree with pron. I don’t see the longevity of the language outside of Android. Too much of drive to use Kotlin focuses on developer experience hype, which is great for starting projects but pretty bad for maintaining them a decade later.

I wish apple realize that kotlin multiplatform is the real threat to the swift ecosystem, and that they refocus the swift project on making it a true cross-platform language

It exports typescript typing too. We are successfully using it for sharing businesses code from our backend with our frontend! Even models can be shared.

&gt; we do not want to encourage people whose personal preference is not to use JetBrains development tools.<p>Ridiculous take. Waste of a good language frankly.

Very cool stuff, I feel like I need to definitely learn Kotlin more now<p>Swift + Kotlin + Java + C + JS + Lisp + C++ should have you covered for most things

This is very exciting, I have wanted to try Kotlin for quite some time and one of the biggest reasons has been few libraries such as arrow-kt[1].<p>&gt; Kotlin&#x2F;JS provides the ability to transpile your Kotlin code, the Kotlin standard library, and any compatible dependencies to JavaScript.<p>What does it means &quot;compatible dependencies&quot;?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arrow-kt.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arrow-kt.io&#x2F;</a>

It says you could build React applications. What about Svelte?<p>Also, what are the pros&#x2F;cons over using typescript? I personally dislike typescript but used to love Kotlin when I was doing more Android development.

Kotlin, the first and only language made to be (single) IDE friendly.