Guys, is there an official report to know what’s the adoption rate of Kotlin on the backend ?

# server

[Ros]

Guys, is there an official report to know what’s the adoption rate of Kotlin on the backend ?

[CLOVIS]

What do you mean by "official"?

[Johann Pardanaud]

here's something that could help you: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/kotlin/

[Johann Pardanaud]

especially this part

[Ros]

Thank you JOhann

[CLOVIS]

That's not the question he asked. This is the share of Kotlin developers who do server-side only. As multiplatform becomes more popular, this is going to naturally decrease. It's not in any way representative of the number of Kotlin developers or how Kotlin compares to anything else.

[Ros]

Ivan do you have any other documentation of the actual use ?

[Johann Pardanaud]

I never said it was the correct answer, but this article contains numbers, and they might help anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[CLOVIS]

It's not possible to measure that. You can do surveys, but the vast majority of people don't answer those. There's not really any way to know anything concrete.

[Ros]

Yes indeed , I ’m trying to collect this info as well , I was al really interested actually in how many companies are using it.

[CLOVIS]

This is 90k developers. It's nothing compared to the real number of devs.

[CLOVIS]

How do you make a survey?

Well, JB makes surveys that are advertised through the JB website/IDEs. These will favor JB users, especially the JVM, Python et Web ecosystems.

StackOverflow makes surveys that are advertised to all users. But the Kotlin community uses this slack much more than they use StackOverflow, so the Kotlin community will be underestimated on StackOverflow surveys.

Studies that are based on search results are biased towards languages that are difficult to work with. If you're working in a language that's very weird and inconvenient, you'll make a lot of Google searches, so it looks like the language is more popular. But maybe there's another language with 10 times the number of users, but it's so trivial to use that they just don't use Google at all. Or maybe they have all the documentation installed on their machine.

Etc, you can't really know anything for certain, it's all estimations and they're often not that great

[Ros]

Thank you Ivan

[Jeff Lockhart]

Those are all great points about surveys, Ivan.

You can get an idea about the growing usage within large organizations that have a lot of engineers and use many different languages. There was

an interesting talk▾

from Google at KotlinConf about their Kotlin adoption over the years.

[Farzad Pezeshkpour]

Fwiw, one part of our company heavily uses Kotlin on the server side. This involves logic, networking, cryptography etc. Controversial statement perhaps: we would like to be able to target wasm instead of the JVM.