[gavinray]

Thank you for the work on KoWasm

It's been exciting to watch the development of the new K2 compiler and Frontend-IR format

Kotlin is no longer just a JVM language, but more like a frontend with targets that now span everything from JVM bytecode, JavaScript, native code with Kotlin Native, and WASM

I'm really excited to see what the future holds for Kotlin and WASM in particular

[flykespice]

Yet most of kotlin standard library is still functions extensions to Java package classes (jvm), if you filter out the function listing in the kotlin website to only implementations common across targets (Common tag), there is very little to be usable.

[brianslp]

Due to the nature of being a frontend-for-everything I think it's best to keep the stdlib's platform-specific functionality minimal.

[tadfisher]

Other platforms don't include Java's standard library, so it would be presumptuous to build one for each platform.

[jillesvangurp]

It's increasingly a full stack language. I would say increasingly more so than javascript since it actually compiles down to native. So, you can use it in the browser, in the jvm, with node.js (not a great fit but it works), on edge networks or in lambda functions (with the native compiler or soon wasm), or on mobile devices.

The main things holding kotlin native back have been the compiler and the library ecosystem. The compiler has been making a lot of progress over the last two years. And the library ecosystem has a growing number of high quality multi platform libraries. So, there's less need for wheel reinvention.

Long term, given enough interest, it could start competing with Rust and Go for system programming type things. Right now, that's probably the weakest area for Kotlin but that is mostly because of the relatively immature library ecosystem around Kotlin native for this. IMHO the language actually fills a nice gap between Rust and Go. Easier than Rust, a bit more high level than Go. So far, Jetbrains seems more interested in mobile than in other use cases for kotlin native though.

Finally, Kotlin is actually a nice fit for data science jobs as well. Nicer than python to use for this and a bit less esoteric than things like Julia or R. There are some interesting libraries for Kotlin for this. But like with native this is all relatively immature and a bit niche at this point.

Some interesting things you might not be aware off:

- multi platform compose is a thing and as of recent releases it has an experimental IOS target as well. So, you can build desktop, android, web, and IOS capable applications now with using Kotlin. Unfortunately Desktop compose still depends on the JVM instead of using the native compiler. So, there's now a third alternative emerging next to Flutter and React Native for cross platform UI.

- ktor server can now be used with the native compiler. So you now have two ways of producing native binaries for ktor via graal and the kotlin native compiler. Great for use with e.g. lambda functions as well.

- kotlin scripting (KTS) is pretty nice and you can use it in more places than just Gradle. It works in Jupyter for example. Or you can generate github actions with it (we do this via krzema12/github-workflows-kt).

- you can plugin wasm to kotlin (and lots of other languages) via extism.org. Haven't tried this but looks intriguing.

[dunefox]

> Finally, Kotlin is actually a nice fit for data science jobs as well. Nicer than python to use for this and a bit less esoteric than things like Julia or R.

Julia and R are esoteric? For Data Science? Also, Kotlin would be relatively low on the list of languages I would use for DS. F# is higher.

[jillesvangurp]

For normal programmers I mean. I know lots of programmers. None of which specialize in Julia or R. They are specialist tools. Python is more a language for generalists. Which is why it is so popular in this space. Kotlin fits more in that category.