State of Kotlin Scripting 2024
TL;DR: Kotlin scripting remains an essential part of the Kotlin infrastructure. We continue to support it in the experimental state, and we are concluding certain experiments and reducing the number of scripting-related technologies that we provide and actively develop.
Kotlin scripting is the technology that enables executing Kotlin code as scripts without prior compilation or packaging into executables. In addition, several extension mechanisms exist to facilitate the usage of Kotlin for specific applications, such as configuring build tools. On top of that, REPL functionality, which is closely related to scripting, is available for Kotlin in various forms (including, for example, Kotlin Notebook).
All these technologies can be found in Kotlin and other JetBrains projects. Some of them are well known, others are barely used, but all require a noticeable amount of attention from the team.
Scripting was introduced into Kotlin long ago as an experiment to investigate new ways of using the language. Since then, the development has been driven by the demand of external and internal adopters, as well as some experiments born inside our team. Over time, we accumulated a lot of functionality related to scripting in our codebase, and the effort required to support it grew quite significantly. Therefore, at some point, we started to review the functionality we have, how it is used inside and outside of JetBrains, and how we can distill it into a reasonable minimal subset that we are willing to support and develop without breaking too many existing use cases.
