That’s good to hear. One could say about Swift that it is a language that is promoted by Apple but not used by them. That is something you can’t say about JetBrains.
It already has: JetBrains. They probably are the largest vendor of Java desktop applications (sold through retail, besides maybe JDownloader). From my observation, they are always putting their money where their mouth is: they were unhappy with JBuilder, thus they created IDEA. They needed to build their products, thus they created TeamCity. They were unhappy with how JIRA handles things, thus they created YouTrack. They were sitting on millions of lines of production Java code, thus they started working on Kotlin.
Gradle has shown significant interest in Kotlin.
Kotlin has significally worked on marketing:
- try.kotlinlang.org is there and shines
- they have improved documentation a lot (thank you guys)
- this forum is very nice (great people and great usability)
- the slack channel is very active with new people coming in every day.
But for the sake of completeness, let’s check which other major players could be there to address:
- Oracle: Unlikely that they switch JEE and their highly priced products over to a technology they don’t control. That’s just not going to happen. Not even if JetBrains sponsors one or multiple yachts to certain people. Currently they are scared as hell that nobody needs their overpriced application servers anymore. Besides that Kotlin is not happening for them: they have a lot bigger fish to fry.
- Google: Is currently fighting against Oracle. I guess, that’s why they are careful about their strategy in regard to Java. I’m also not seeing how you could seamlessly integrate existing Android applications with frameworks written in a native language (e.g. Go). I was hoping that they would embrace Kotlin (instead of Java 8 for Android, though). But let’s see how that turns out.
- Spring: Spring boot supports Kotlin. As long as it runs with their frameworks on the JVM, it’s fine with them.
- IBM: Not even IBM knows what IBM does.
- Lightbend: Even though they are a Scala shop they are now marketing a framework strongly targeted at Java developers. I just don’t think Kotlin really is going to happen for them. They are are loud on marketing and collected a lot of venture capital funding, though.
- RedHat: I suppose they make a lot of money from the maintenance contracts of their application servers (JBoss). Thus they probably are more interested in mingling with Oracles’ corporate customers than they care about a new JVM language.
- SAP: not sure. Not even if this were a good thing.
- cloud providers (Amazon, *Microsoft) are more about locking people into their platform. As Kotlin runs seamlessly on the JVM, it’s fine with them.
I’m sure there are more companies that I could mention. But the future of Kotlin probably is not any of them. But developers like you and me are.