So, when I saw the ongoing standardization of WebAssembly in 2016, I immediately thought it would be a great opportunity for Kotlin. Since I work in this industry, I have always tried to find solutions to avoid tech silos and to allow sharing code for various usages. Kotlin provides a compiler plugin mechanism capable of powerful build-time transformations. You write common code that will be shared, then add the required specific bits for the platform(s) you target (JVM, JavaScript, Native). Thanks to its DSL and scripting capabilities, Kotlin has also been chosen as the language used to describe Gradle builds.Įven if the most successful use-cases are targeting the JVM, Kotlin has dedicated support for developing multiplatform projects. On the server-side, Java remains the leader, but Kotlin has a significant market share, and a lot of Spring developers are using Kotlin to develop their Spring Boot applications. The widest adoption of Kotlin is on mobile, since Google has chosen Kotlin as the official language for Android. One of its key features is that it turns the billion-dollar mistake (null references) into build-time null-safety to check the presence of a value. It manages to be both concise and expressive, has a pragmatic mindset while remaining elegant, and has found, in my opinion, the right balance between imperative and functional programming. Kotlin is a modern statically-typed and garbage-collected language. Let’s begin with a quick presentation of the language.

I led the introduction of Kotlin and GraalVM native images in Spring, but today, I am going to talk about the work I do on Kotlin/Wasm as a side project. Sébastien Hey, I am Sébastien Deleuze, I work as a Spring Framework committer at VMware.

We will see what the possibilities there are and also have a look at the inside. We are going to have a quick journey around Kotlin/Wasm.

I’m writing Kotlin in Kotlin at JetBrains and leading Kotlin/Wasm. The recording is also available on YouTube. This blog post is a refined transcription of the presentation Zalim Bashorov and I gave at Wasm I/O 2023 to introduce Kotlin/Wasm.

Online compiler kotlin