I am not sure it can be be concluded from any data. They have come up with just a tech preview. Doing better job than Rust/Swift/Java or Go to have high perf on native platforms is going to be a huge effort. Just having a binding via LLVM is a small start.
Hope they do better but for now it seems to me that hype around it is about 2-3 magnitudes higher than the actual amount of software written in it.
The tech preview is about kotlin compiling directly to machine code. They already said they haven't done any optimization into that code. I guess they use some intermediate language for the compiler to translate it to machine code. (note that all the compilers translate the original input file into this intermediate language before compiling it to the final code, so they can do a lot of optimization and checks in this code which are shared among all languages)
Throw in the fact that their IDE software is open source only until you need the most advanced features, and I can imagine Kotlin never picking up as much steam as Rust or Swift with their comparably inferior tooling ecosystems. I can imagine C# taking over java before Kotlin does.
Emacs does sponsor a language (elisp), and it's most people's reason for using it.
Actually that is how many enterprise companies work.
I usually get to use what the IT department from our customers has decided as IDE for a specific project.
Anything else usually requires a change request with the necessary approvals at all levels, which means very few people ever bother to go through that pain, assuming that it will be approved in the end, because "I don't like X" won't work as reason.
How well does "else I quit, my code, my tools" works as a reason?
We are talking about enterprise here, there are plenty of people for that position, specially external consultants, no one would be stopping you from leaving.
In fact they might even help you taking your things out.
Well, if you're an external consultant, it's they that called you to get them out of some mess in the first place.
You didn't knock on their door to ask for work.
The only time I had some kind of freedom, away from what IT says how things should be, was at a few startups.
Once those startups grew, the big boys from IT started to create a standard development environment.
Many companies mandate that you use Visual Studio to develop with because their entire toolchain is setup to build the project via VS tools. Deviating from that means that no one can help you, and you're probably polluting the repo with your own ad-hoc tooling.
With Scala being more than a decade old, its most popular usage is Apache Spark project which is not saying much. Kotlin would first have to reach beyond Scala which itself is small percentage point of Java.
Intellij Idea as IDE is a great choice. Android developers were forced to move from Eclipse to Idea and I haven't seen any resistance to avoid it. I have heard iOS developers complaning about tooling around swift. So, I think it is a strong point.
I think you've missed something here...
Yesterday I took a look at their tools and they are all absolutely great but I didn't download a single one since they are all 30-day trial and I am as poor as fuck.
So tease me, convert me, let me use your tools for years and when the time comes I am ready for an enterprise I'd take my knowledge with me, and my tools.
JetBrains are you listening?
I believe it includes Kotlin Support.
They just do not promote the community edition for commercial development.
I, for instance, could choose to use PyCharm community since I rarely use any of the tooling that comes with the 'pro edition', but when I do need something---like Cython debugging---its damned useful.
You can certainly do commercial applications using Intellij IDEA CE, if you don't need Java EE, Spring, GWT, Grails, etc deep integration in the IDE.
I wanted to read 'The Swift Programming Language (Swift 3.1 Edition)'. It is just an epub, just distributed via Apple iBooks, right?
When trying to open in on an Android tablet, I found out that it is DRM-ed. Why on earth would you put DRM on a publication you want to circulate as widely as possible? Why would anyone have to read reference docs for multi platform language on a single platform?
That certainly dampened my enthusiasm for Swift.
https://swift.org/documentation/
I never had any issue reading it on Aldiko, even the Apple versions.
> This ePub document is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License.
They should make PDF/html available to all.
The (non-DRM) epub is fine too, it is just a bunch of of html files, zipped.
https://swift.org/documentation/TheSwiftProgrammingLanguage(...
In contrast to Scala, Kotlin has a much stronger focus on Java interop so its able to much better leverage the JVM ecosystem. In particular, Kotlin hits a really good sweet spot for Android development, where it can still be compatible with older JVM versions, the language features can really increase readability and reduce bugs, and the overhead isn't too dramatic.
The network effects also amplify its usefulness; JetBrains continues improving the language and its tooling; Android Studio is based on IntelliJ so the integration is also strong; more developers use the language and produce more libraries, frameworks, and ensure compatibility is excellent.
By design you can begin using Kotlin in a Java project slowly (there's even a Java->Kotlin converter), so if you are developing on a Java stack, Kotlin is worth investigating!