The London Java Community: The State of Kotlin and Ten Things To Do With GraalVM

The State of Kotlin:

Over the last three months Zan Markan ran a survey of the global Kotlin ecosystem. His goal was to learn how developers use and adopt Kotlin - either in work or side projects, or just for playing around, and what are some of the most popular resources for learning it. The survey was a great success, and gained over 2400 responses in total! The results are meant to become a resource for the Kotlin community. Something we can all look at for interesting insights that will also help drive adoption of Kotlin in our teams and organisations.

To give you a taster, here’s a few questions he asked in the survey:
• How big is Android as a proportion of all Kotlin developers
• Are people happy naming libraries and tooling with K
• What are the favourite features of the language
• What kind of DSLs are people building with Kotlin and for what use-cases

This talk will answer all these questions, and more. But be warned, some answers might surprise you.

Speaker Bio:

Zan is a Developer turned Evangelist at Pusher with over 8 years of experience in software development. He spends the days educating developers across the world about the wonders of programming, realtime technologies, and good API design (and nights fighting crime). Before DevRel he used to dabble in mobile and SDK development, especially on Android. Currently he fancies Kotlin, Node, TypeScript, and the UX of APIs in general. Other hobbies include speaking at conferences and yelling at computers.

Ten Things To Do With GraalVM:

Oracle Labs is working on a new native compiler for the Java Virtual Machine called Graal. Graal is 'one compiler to rule them all', meaning we use it for both just-in-time compilation, and ahead-of-time compilation, for Java, JavaScript, Ruby, R, Python, C and other languages.

You may have heard the term 'Graal' but you are probably not aware of how many incredible things it can do.

It can run your Java application faster, compile Java to standalone native executables that start instantly, compile Java libraries to native libraries, run languages like JavaScript, Ruby, R, Python, including polyglot programs written in more than one of these languages, it can run native languages like C and C++ on the JVM, it gives you tools like debuggers that work across languages, and much more.

Speaker Bio:

Chris Seaton is a Research Manager at the Virtual Machine Group in Oracle Labs, where he leads the work to implement Ruby using the next generation of Java Virtual Machine technology and other projects, and a Visitor at the University of Manchester.

Before this he completed a PhD at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Doctor Mikel Luján, where he researched programming languages and irregular parallelism. Before that, he completed a MEng at the University of Bristol on languages with mutable syntax and semantics.

Between his undergraduate degree and starting his PhD, he commissioned into the British Army, serving in training and operations in the UK and around the world. In his spare time, he's now a captain in the Cheshire Yeomanry squadron of the Queen's Own Yeomanry, Cheshire's historic reserve light cavalry squadron.

You can read our interview with Zan and Chris here: bit.ly

This is a placeholder for the event which is being run on Eventbrite. See the full details/register here: bit.ly

6.00pm: Doors open.
6.15pm: The State of Kotlin - Zan Markan
6.45pm: Break
7.00pm - Ten Things To Do With GraalVM - Chris Seaton
8:00pm - Finish

Big thanks to Oracle Cloud for providing the venue.

This event is organised by RecWorks on behalf of the London Java Community. You can see our latest jobs here: recworks.co.uk. You can see our privacy policy here: recworks.co.uk

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The London Java Community (LJC) is a group of Java Enthusiasts who are interested in benefiting from shared knowledge in the industry. Through our forum and regular meetings you can keep in touch with the latest industry developments, learn new Java (& other JVM) technologies, meet other developers, discuss technical/non technical issues and network further throughout the Java Community.