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by mncolinlee 3325 days ago
I should note that Kotlin now supports JDK, JS, iOS, and LLVM as backends. Gradle also announced support for Kotlin. This means you can write your Android app, iOS app, web browser app, desktop app, and your build scripts -- finally all in the same language.
2 comments
virtualwhys 3325 days ago
That's a pretty absurd claim, their native implementation is not only experimental, the GC solution is "unknown". You can't make this stuff up, it will be years before anyone is writing production IOS apps in Kotlin.

Heck, their JS implementation still generates massive binaries. Targeting the JVM/Android? Sure, good to go; otherwise the promised land is a long way off.

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ptx 3325 days ago
"Unknown"? They have said from the beginning that it uses reference counting with cycle collection, for example in RELEASE_NOTES.md:

"Currently Kotlin/Native uses reference counting based memory management scheme with a cycle collection algorithm. Multiple threads could be used, but no objects shared between threads are allowed."

They have also said that it's pluggable and they might experiment with other collectors on different platforms, but it's hardly "unknown".

The size of generated JS is definitely a problem at the moment but they're working on it:

https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/kotlin-js-file-size/2501/2

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virtualwhys 3325 days ago
The point is that the claim of cross platform everything is wildly unrealistic at this time. JVM/Android is production ready; javascript, getting there; native, not even close.

I don't doubt that 2-3 years from now Kotlin will have a cross platform solution, but to claim so today is borderline delusional. It's understandable that users are excited, Kotlin's on the verge of bigger things, perhaps even mainstream level adoption if everything falls into place, but there's a ways to go before they achieve one-language-to-rule-them-all.

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mncolinlee 3325 days ago
Absurd, not really. I even forgot one of the most important platforms. It's very production ready on server and is highly supported by Pivotal for Swing Boot server apps.

It seems the only "beta" platform listed there is LLVM, which doesn't even work on Windows yet. The point is that we should expect these things to improve quickly. JetBrains are hardly hacks. Kotlin existed in production being used by major Android apps while significant libraries were still incompatible.

I doubt believe anyone read my comment and thought, "WOW, I should pitch this for production on every platform today without even investigating." It's a useful data point as proof of where they intend to be quite soon.

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nathan_f77 3325 days ago
WOW, what?? That's amazing! I want to write some cross-platform native code for React Native modules, and I was considering Rust. But I will definitely have to check out Kotlin now.
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