TypeScript vs KotlinJS

GOTO Amsterdam 2022

Join us for a session on TypeScript vs KotlinJS with the dynamic duo, Eamonn Boyle and Garth Gilmour.

Everyone is coding in JavaScript at the moment, and yet no one is. It’s increasingly rare to find modern developers working in plain old ES6 when there are a plethora of alternatives available. Every emerging language seems to offer compilation to JS and/or WebAssembly, whilst dedicated alternatives like Elm, Reason and PureScript are driving innovation.

Without any disrespect to these fine languages it’s not unfair to say that enterprise IT is focusing on TypeScript and Kotlin.js as the main alternatives to plain old JavaScript.

TypeScript emerged on the client and is now conquering the server. Initially, it was a safer way to write your Angular or React UI, but these days it’s a respectable and fully supported language for serverless apps (e.g. via the AWS Cloud Development Kit). As the language has evolved its feature set has become remarkably powerful, to the extent where type driven development and meta-programming can be productively used by mere mortals.

Kotlin has grown from the other extreme. It began as a language for simplifying Java development in environments like Android and Spring Boot. But over the past two years, the language has outgrown the JVM and now also targets JS, WebAssembly and native binaries. Multi-platform projects enable teams to create a single consistent domain model that can be universal within a distributed application with web and mobile UI’s.

This talk will lay out the value propositions for the most recent versions of TypeScript and Kotlin.js. Eamonn Boyle and Garth Gilmour will evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these languages.

What will the audience learn from this talk?

• About in-depth coverage of new language features in Kotlin and TypeScript
• The future directions of Kotlin and TypeScript and their suitability for different kinds of distributed architectures