The latest Kotlin JS/TS survey made me a bit frust...

# multiplatform

[Tóth István Zoltán]

The latest Kotlin JS/TS survey made me a bit frustrated. Rant in the thread (also sent it in the survey).

[Tóth István Zoltán]

The environments such as Vue, Angular, Svelte, next.js does not exist for Kotlin.

I feel this is the most critical problem. Why would anyone switch and face all the troubles of building up a whole environment in Kotlin when these are ready-to-go in JS/TS.

For developers of such environments in Kotlin recognition and support from the community and Jetbrains is non-existent. I've been developing such a library and it is very hard to get ANY feedback.

A single Compose component (not even targeting web), gets like 100+ starts on GitHub. A Vue or Angular level library gets 10.

The reason is that the single component is visible, ready for immediate use.

A Vue or Angular level library requires immense amount of work and takes years to develop. With Kotlin/JS coming late to the scene it has immense competition in this area, therefore developers do not consider it reasonable to do such a thing.

The problem is that the official Kotlin communication simply does not care about this. Frankly, you take these surveys once a year and then nothing changes.

What about supporting not just the next "slider with a different color" but some more complex web library projects?

I feel that Compose will kill Kotlin sooner or later if it will be the single one to rule them all.

[Robert Jaros]

JB motivation and priorities are understandable. JB is not Microsoft nor Google. Having limited resources, they are prioritizing Compose Multiplatform, the one thing that actually has the potential to become a gamechanger in cross-platform Android/iOS development, as well as a serious source of revenue from IDE sales. Everything else, including Kotlin itself, is just an add-on that we get for free 🙂

[Robert Jaros]

Frameworks and libraries outside the CMP world have to be created by the community - we have to live with it whether we like it or not.

[Tóth István Zoltán]

Yes, I agree with that. However, the survey was specifically about JS/TS and that part suffers from JB's Compose focused approach.

[Robert Jaros]

Yep. I gave up filling out this survey, because I felt I'm not the target 🙂

[Tóth István Zoltán]

You are not the target with KVision? 😳 Who is then?

[Tóth István Zoltán]

I also feel that the Android/iOS focus is not sustainable on the long run. There are just way too many changes happening to bet on that one single thing.

What should be (and actually is with KMP) the focus is a kind of "abstract application development". At the end we do not really care about the actual platform.

We actually care about is the application specification.

This might sound strange, but if you think about it, you decide what the application should do and then you want an implementation to do that. Whatever is in-between getting less and less important (this is the biggest, fattest lie, but still has a core of truth). This is the thinking the world is going towards.

As I see, Kotlin and Jetbrains can be a winner in this change. They've laid the groundwork, KMP is amazing. However, if they don't get the web part together all AI code generation stuff will generate only JS/TS code. To quote from a Medium article: "<whatever AI app generator> wanted to use React very strongly".

It should be "wanted to use Kotlin very strongly". But for that it needs something to work with.

[streetsofboston]

Maybe JetBrains is banking on WASM to be the long term future of web?

[Tóth István Zoltán]

Might be so. But I feel it is more like they want to promote Kotlin/JS but don't know how. My post is about why it does not gain traction and what to do about it.