Hello :kotlin_emoji: fans, What if Node had been ...

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[Samuel Gammon]

Hello K fans,

What if Node had been written in Kotlin, on top of the JVM, instead of in C++? Well, with Elide, we may find out. You may have seen us earlier in the #hiring and #framework-elide channels. We are finally launching our runtime and framework components in alpha, a high-performance and polyglot version of Node, built mostly in Kotlin, on top of GraalVM.

The power of the JVM is undeniable 💪 but the development speed and ergonomics of Node.js can be very attractive. Too often, we hear of teams in Kotlin who need to defend the amazing technologies we have access to (JVM, multiplatform, etc), because of the productivity offered by Next.js and similar frameworks.

What we have built, hopefully, can help bridge the gap: you could execute your React app from Kotlin, using, say, Micronaut or Ktor. With a sidecar JavaScript VM, you can begin to meld the functions in your app which end up in TypeScript versus Kotlin. Between these languages, you can share objects, letting you fetch from a database and hand it right from JDBC to React to perform a render in JavaScript.

All of these things are possible with Elide, which we are launching in alpha on Thurs next week. It is open source. The event is free and online, and all are welcome, whether you write Kotlin, Java, JS, Typescript, Ruby, Python, WASM, or LLVM; coincidentally, the language list we are planning to support via GraalVM 🙂.

Our goal is to make your jobs easy, and to weaken the hard boundaries between languages -- culturally and technically. At the end of the day, we are all engineers, and we think that more of our code should work better together. Less of all our ideas should be thrown away or built over and over. If that was the case, we'd get more done, our dreams would be here sooner, and we could do more with less. This is what the polyglot future could mean.

How you can join or help: Come to the meetup (online)! Even if you can't, that's okay. Check out the code samples and videos, throw us a repo ⭐ . Even an RSVP on the event helps us build reach, and the event will be posted after as video so if you miss it that's okay!

We have gained so much from the Kotlin community over the years and hopefully this is a way we can give back. Thank you for reading 😄

• Meetup event: Join us for the launch! (Online, free to attend)
• GitHub (plz ignore most of readme, it is being refactored before release next week)
• Website (which itself runs on Elide, with Kotlin, React SSR, MUI, Docker)
• We have a channel here (#framework-elide) and a Discord

[franztesca]

Pretty cool, thanks!
I cannot access this link because of https issues with the certificate at https://v3.docs.elide.dev/kotlin/html/

[Sam Gammon]

@franztesca thank you for letting me know! We are updating all the docs ahead of launch as they are painfully out of date :(

[Sam Gammon]

If you can, come to the launch event where you’ll see it in action live. The demos at the launch event will be available on GitHub too 👍