We have an SDK optimized for use with Kotlin 1.9 and 2.0, but a client is asking us to repackage it in order to support 1.8.x, which they are still on. We try not to do things for a single client, so I’ve been trying to find some statistics on what percentage of the developer community is still on 1.8.x vs 1.9 or the brand new spiffy wonderful 2.0. If we’re talking 2% are still on 1.8, it’s a lot easier to say no than if it’s, say, 30%.
Can anyone help me?
Thanks in advance!
This is SO hard to answer… at my company, we have lots of microservices using Kotlin. Most of them haven’t been kept up to date. There are still a few microservices in our system using Kotlin 1.2 or 1.3. There’s a decent chunk using 1.4. Then there’s some using 1.5, 1.6, and a bunch using 1.8. So far, we haven’t got any microservices using a newer version than Kotlin 1.8. (We want to get there, but there’s some blockers)
But all of that said… does this even matter to you? Is the SDK you’re developing something that my company would ever use? If not, then the versions of Kotlin that my company is using are completely irrelevant to you.
I think the best you could do would be to try and find some kind of tool that can scan GitHub (and maybe other online git repositories) and see what version of Kotlin is being used. That’d give you an idea of the public break down of Kotlin versions being used.
I agree. If you can focus on open source projects only, and if you have access to the GCP, please be aware BigQuery keeps a snapshot of all GitHub projects, so we can very easily search through it and make different kinds of aggregations using just a few lines of SQL. I saw some queries for checking inter-project dependencies already.
If we don’t target open source only then… to be honest, I don’t even see how anyone including JetBrains could know these percentages. It is different to e.g. Android, where almost all mobile phones are connected to Google services, so Google knows what are versions of the Android. In the case of Kotlin, some companies use it internally and nobody outside the company know about this, not to mention the exact version.
You can also check dependencies against Kotlin stdlib in Maven repos: https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.jetbrains.kotlin/kotlin-stdlib Please note the “Usages” column. But it will require a little work to make sure we interpret these numbers correctly.
Thanks all! I really appreciate the input.