Interesting. Coming from Spring to Ktor, being able to easily inspect the internal workings has been one of my favourite bits!

It’s ‘advanced’ kotlin in there for sure, and takes some learning of the internal plumbing, but having everything not hidden behind annotations has been great.

Just a CMD+click on whatever Ktor DSL/plugin API your using and you can immediately start to follow along / debug what it’s actually doing.

Oh absolutely. I admittedly haven't used Spring beyond trying it out for a couple hours and deciding never again, but I can easily imagine Ktor being an improvement over Spring. When I wrote my comment, I was more thinking about it in comparison to Netty and Java-Websockets (relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43800784), rather than as a web framework, though I have used it as such.

Netty is also a struggle to inspect so perhaps I just struggle with deep abstraction in general? I find code to be far better documentation than actual documentation, particularly when so much of it is along these lines:

    /**
     * Gets the next string.
     *
     * @return Returns the next string, or null.
     */
    public abstract @Nullable String getNextString();