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by KingMob 3325 days ago
Would be lovely if they officially supported Clojure too.
5 comments
vickychijwani 3324 days ago
As much as I want this, it's not going to happen for the simple reason that Clojure adds a big runtime and a huge startup cost on Android, which is unacceptable. It's fine for servers, but a total deal-breaker for mobile apps.

Kotlin on the other hand has a tiny runtime (< 1 MB before dead-code elimination etc with Proguard) and negligible startup cost - in fact several popular Android libraries have a bigger startup cost impact than Kotlin.

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gshayban 3325 days ago
I'd love that too, but there is a startup time overhead with the Clojure runtime. Given the moves Google's made in recent wrt moving away from JIT for startup time reasons, this would be challenging.
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on_and_off 3325 days ago
Google has chosen to support kotlin because the community has very strongly pushed in that direction.

I am not too familiar with Clojure, what would it bring us that kotlin (or java) don't have ?

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Skunkleton 3325 days ago
Parenthesis.

And lots of other things too. I just wanted to make a lisp joke. I will see myself out.

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jakebasile 3325 days ago
I'm with you, but I think the size and startup time of Clojure might be a big hurdle.
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MBlume 3325 days ago
If you want to use Clojure on Android, I'd recommend Clojurescript and React Native https://github.com/drapanjanas/re-natal
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