Moving 1M users to Kotlin & Compose: JB Toolbox

Victor Kropp tells us the story of moving JetBrains Toolbox from
C++ to 100% Kotlin. Victor (https://twitter.com/kropp) leads the
Toolbox team at JetBrains, a small app that is the single entry
point for developing with JetBrains IDEs, which you can download at
https://www.jetbrains.com/toolbox-app/. It allows you to
automatically download and update your IDEs, and open all your
projects with a single click. Victor shares the story of how
toolbox came to be – from its humble beginnings as an internal
Hackathon project back in 2015, to an app serving 1 million monthly
active users. Together, we dive into the tech stack of Toolbox and
its evolution. We learn about the initial tech stack: C++ for the
business logic and JavaScript and React for the user interface.
Victor shares the challenges and benefits of using this stack –
from hiring to UI visuals. We learn why Toolbox took the big step
of migrating from C++ to Kotlin, from the ability to reuse code in
the IntelliJ platform to developer ergonomics. Victor takes us
through the multi-step process of how they arrived at a pure-Kotlin
solution. The first step we talk about is the migration of the
Toolbox business logic to Kotlin using Regex wizardry and
reimplementing methods with the help of Kotlin’s auto-converter.
Victor then sheds some light on replacing the embedded web user
interface with Compose for Desktop
(https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose/), and the benefits Toolbox
gained from it: reducing the load of having to serialize a lot of
objects, being able to use the same language when implementing a
full feature front to back, library reuse, and better performance.
We learn that this transition only took 6 months, while still being
able to ship new features to Toolbox at the same time, and why the
team chose Kotlin on the JVM instead of Kotlin/Native. With React
and Compose for Desktop both being modern declarative UI
frameworks, Victor also talks more about how concepts and
vocabulary transfers between the two
(https://tigeroakes.com/posts/react-to...), lowering the barrier of
entry for people who want to build native user interfaces and
already have web development experience. We also learn more about
how Toolbox moved design primitives and UI components from the CSS
to the Compose layout system, among other topics. Seb also
compliments Hadi on the Ktor 2.0 presentation
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mye9N...) from the Kotlin 2021
Premier Online Event (https://pages.jetbrains.com/kotlin-pr...).