What to Expect From the Kotlin Team in 2022–23: Key Projects and Productivity Features

Egor Tolstoy

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Kotlin is commonly used for writing server-side, multiplatform, and Android apps, but there are tons of lesser known use cases. Among them are Minecraft plugin development, writing software for robots, or even creating PowerPoint presentations using Compose for Desktop. The number of use cases to address and potential improvements to implement is huge, and it’s important for us to focus on the things that would be most beneficial for you. Every year we select a number of key projects and work hard to deliver them. For 2022–2023, our key projects are:

• Improve the quality and stability of Kotlin releases
• Release the Beta version of the K2 compiler
• Release the Stable version of Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile
• Release the Alpha version of the Kotlin IntelliJ IDEA plugin with K2 support plugin
• Release the Stable version of the Kotlin/JS IR backend

These key projects, together with our other plans, constitute about 50 roadmap tickets. Some of them will affect your experience directly, while others might go unnoticed. To help you navigate through the Kotlin roadmap, we’ve divided the improvements into a few categories. We’d greatly appreciate it if you vote for the most important tickets and leave your feedback!

Please note that this is just a selection, not the whole roadmap.

If you want to save more time

Consider these improvements:

• With the K2 compiler in Beta, you will be able to build a wide range of projects about twice as fast.
• The Kotlin IntelliJ IDEA plugin with K2 support in Alpha will improve the performance of code completion, highlighting, and navigation in your IDE.
• The new `..<` operator will help you make up to 20–30% fewer errors while reading code that contains ranges.
• The stabilization of compilation avoidance support in Gradle will decrease build times, especially for cross-module incremental compilation.

If you write multiplatform mobile apps

The following improvements particularly deserve your attention:

• Multiplatform support for the K2 compiler will allow you to build multiplatform projects significantly faster.
• Promoting the new memory manager to Beta, along with the optimization of kotlinx-coroutines, will give you better runtime performance by default.
• Further experiments with exporting Kotlin code to Objective-C may give you the ability to generate a separate namespace for each Kotlin module when exporting multiple modules to your iOS code.
• Parsing and formatting support in kotlinx-datetime will provide you with a fully featured multiplatform datetime library for your projects.

If you’re a library developer

Be sure to check out these improvements:

• The stabilization of the Compiler Plugin API will give you a solid foundation for building your tools.
• Namespaces support will help you build cleaner APIs by grouping declarations together under a common prefix.
• The Dokka Stable release will improve your onboarding experience and improve Dokka’s API and layouts.

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Pick the new features you’re most eagerly anticipating and share them in the comments section of this blogpost or on Twitter!

Learn more

• Kotlin roadmap
• #kotlin-roadmap channel in the public Slack (get an invite)
• Kotlin YouTube channel

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