Earlier this year, Pusher surveyed more than 2,500 developers to get a better understanding of the ecosystem, specifically around usage, features and demographics.
Key report findings:
Kotlin is used both in work and personal projects, as confirmed by 60 percent of respondents. Kotlin is even more prominent in side projects, as they tend to be smaller, easier to convert and more experimental.
Android is hugely popular across the board, used by professional developers and students alike. However, when it comes to backend applications, Kotlin’s users tend to be more experienced developers.
Most Kotlin developers come from a Java background, or also work with Java. More than 87 percent of respondents have migrated existing Java code to Kotlin. However, more than a quarter of respondents who migrated Java to Kotlin needed to revert back due to both technical and organizational reasons. Tools that use reflection or generate code were mentioned most often as technical reasons to revert to Java.
Null safety is the favorite feature for 80 percent of respondents, whereas co-routines and multi-platform support are the least important.
The report concluded that Kotlin is overwhelmingly popular in the Android circles. This raises the question, Will Kotlin break into communities outside Android?
“We expect to see new generations of developers taking their first steps into programming with Kotlin,” said Pusher Developer Evangelist Zan Markan in an email. “It’s a modern, versatile, cross-platform language that can cross between OO, functional, scripting, and declarative paradigms with ease. This could mean that Kotlin will affect the wider programming language landscape by becoming a benchmark for what a programming language should be able to do.”
Read the full report here.