[flax]

Could you explain why? I have been interested, in theory, in Kotlin Multiplatform. But I'm already very comfortable in Dart and Flutter. I have decades of experience with Java, Javascript, and quite a few years with Typescript. Kotlin feels like a different kind of language, one I find grating. I think this is primarily aesthetic, but it's still enough to make getting over the initial hump annoying. As petty as it is, I think the lack of statement-terminating semicolons is a major reason I do not like it. I would welcome a factual list of things that make the KM experience better for you.

[vips7L]

Kotlin doesn’t feel right to me either. I did a portion of AoC in it this year and it was surprisingly more verbose than I expected. I think the thing I liked the least was trailing lambda syntax combined with how verbose it was to define variables with types.

It also inherits all of the bad parts of the JVM. Crappy build tooling (gradle), and then the slow startup and high memory usage.

[cosmic_cheese]

Coming from writing a ton of Swift (and previously Obj-C), Kotlin’s ergonomics feel kinda off. It also feels like it’s different for the sake of being different more often than I’d like.

[Larrikin]

Can you give concrete examples? I played with Swift in school after already making the dive into Kotlin. It just felt like Kotlin but trapped on Apple. Part of the program even included a course in using a different language every couple weeks where we went through Scala, Lisp, and some others just to see what they could do.

Currently Kotlin is far and away my favorite language but I also haven't looked into the newer languages recently and am interested in hearing pain points people have. Especially if it isn't annoyances with Gradle

[cosmic_cheese]

Broadly speaking, Kotlin deviates from popular conventions more than Swift does. For example, Kotlin expects you to use inline if statements where in Swift, ternary operators work like they do in C, JavaScript, and many other languages.

There's also things like Swift's guard statements that can help make intent clearer and read a bit more nicely.

[myHNAccount123]

Same opinion. It just feels off. Why use `fun` for function declarations instead of func or function? Dropping () before { makes it hard to tell what runs first. It feels like it's trying to be different for the sake of being different. I'm not able to quickly skim kotlin code like other 'C-like' languages and tell what is going on because it's trying to be too clever.

[llmslave2]

You're just not used to it.

[satvikpendem]

I used Kotlin as well and it just feels off too. The package support is a major thing, as I don't want to mess around in Gradle, I want something that Just Works™. Dart 3 has much of the same feature set as Kotlin now with sealed class support, it's just not as functional, but it recently got tearoffs so you don't have to specify the class, just the property, similar to Swift (ie if you have an `enum Color { red, blue }` and a function takes `Color`, you can just do `f(.red)` not `f(Color.red)`).

The main thing though is that Dart has pub.dev and a CLI that makes it extremely easy to add packages, via `dart pub add`. If I do want to go more of a functional route I'll just use Rust instead, it has all of what Kotlin has and more, plus a similar streamlined package management as Dart in the form of `cargo add`.

[BoorishBears]

Funny you say that since Dart is the primary reason most people I know don't want to use Flutter.

There's been a trend of improved DX for languages used in app development:

ObjC -> Swift

Java -> Kotlin

Javascript -> Typescript

...Dart feels like the before with no after, even though it got traction in the era of the Afters.

[vips7L]

Darts pretty good. It has a lot of modern features, nullable types, pattern matching, sum types, and factory constructors; some really good build tooling. It can compile fully AoT.

[saagarjha]

It’s not very good if you’re comparing it against Kotlin or Swift though.

[realusername]

It's a matter of taste, even just the swift example on this website makes me raise eyebrows.

[saagarjha]

I think that is valid because the syntax shown off here is controversial. However, I think Dart is just generally worse in almost all of its features.

[wiseowise]

It is great if you’re comparing it against Kotlin or Swift, unless you’re stuck in an era of 1.x Dart.

[saagarjha]

I would consider it to be weaker in power to both

[wiseowise]

Programming languages aren’t anime.

[satvikpendem]

Eh, it's getting there, slowly at first but more rapidly now. It now got tearoffs, I explained in another comment but

> if you have an `enum Color { red, blue }` and a function takes `Color`, you can just do `f(.red)` not `f(Color.red)`

Dart is getting new features pretty fast, they really started focusing on the DX more after Dart 2 and now especially after Dart 3. Macros were supposed to ship but it was incompatible with the goals of fast compilation, so other sorts of smaller features will ship instead.

[virtualwhys]

Big turnoff with Dart is the lack of json (de) serialization -- kind of shocking to have to resort to source code generation libraries in a modern language.

Also, statement based instead of expression based, and not immutable by default are kind of a drag; not the end of the world but a bit unpleasant, IMO.

[satvikpendem]

Serialization support is coming, probably this year. As for statements vs expressions, it does have some expressions such as if and for inside lists but changing it wholesale to an expression based language would be too much of a breaking change.

[vips7L]

I thought dart could natively deserialize via dart:convert? It just only decodes to lists and maps, you have to manually map into classes.

[websiteapi]

isn't this just because Dart is way newer than those? it's from the 2010s. it's really modern in comparison (same generation as Kotlin swift and typescript)

[BoorishBears]

> Dart feels like the before with no after, even though it got traction in the era of the Afters.

It's aged like the recent languages but feels clunkier like a language that's much much older.

[mdhb]

Dart is hands down the best modern language out there for app development right now what are you even talking about? I understand that maybe a lot of people haven’t used it or maybe haven’t used it in years and that probably drives a lot of the FUD but for those who use it, it has stupidly high ratings from developers who use it and has for years.

[BoorishBears]

It's not FUD when you make something terrible* and that reputation doesn't immediately slough off.

And I just checked the Dart release notes from all of 2025: https://dart.dev/resources/whats-new

Great progress! But smells a lot like the language I had it pegged for when "underscore as a wildcard" lands in February 2025, 2 years after pattern matching lands.

How did they ship pattern matching in 2023, with a million examples of how to do it right already hashed out and in the wild... and then not figure out a wildcard symbol for 2 years?

-

* Dart was awful, lost to Javascript because no one rated it highly enough to justify moving off Javascript, and was practically dead until Flutter dusted off the corpse and pivoted away from their browser goals... so super weird revisionism to act like we're talking about some beloved evergreen language.

[munificent]

> How did they ship pattern matching in 2023, with a million examples of how to do it right already hashed out and in the wild... and then not figure out a wildcard symbol for 2 years?

We shipped support for `_` as wildcards in patterns with Dart 3.0 when pattern matching first shipped.

However, prior to Dart 3.0, `_` was already a valid identifier (as it is in most other languages). The feature you're mentioning from last year was to remove support for uses of `_` as an identifier outside of patterns. This way `_` consistently behaves like a wildcard everywhere in the language. We didn't ship that in 3.0 because it's a breaking change and those are harder to roll out without causing a lot of user pain.

It's OK to not like Dart. There are multiple popular languages for a reason. But it is helpful when communicating about a language to others to be accurate so that they can make their own informed opinions.

[wiseowise]

You seem confused and indeed spreading FUD.

Dart wasn’t awful. It wasn’t adopted at the time because it had a distinct runtime that would require splitting web in two which nobody wanted. On top of that it gave Google too much power, because now they would control both runtime (V8) + language (Dart).

TypeScript won and became king because it was pretty much JS 2.0 instead of JS++ like Dart.

[BoorishBears]

In your version of history Dart was always a great language... but Google was simultaneously too powerful for other vendors to allow Dart to proliferate, but also too weak to sustain it themselves despite Chrome going on to do just that for many many web standards.

I'm sure that's a really cozy idea, but doesn't pass the "common sense" test: a bit like your random misuse of the term FUD.

-

The simple reality is it wasn't very good, so no one was rushing to use it, and that limited how hard Google could push it. ES6 made Javascript good enough for the time being.

Dart 1.x had a weak type system, and Dart 2 was adding basics Kotlin already had almost 2 years earlier: that was also around the time I first crossed paths with Flutter, and honestly Flutter by itself was also pretty god awful since it was slowly reinventing native UI/UX from a canvas.

(It was a lot like Ionic: something you used when you had a captive user-base that literally couldn't pick a better product. Great for Google!)

[wiseowise]

> In your version of history Dart was always a great language... but Google was simultaneously too powerful for other vendors to allow Dart to proliferate, but also too weak to sustain it themselves despite Chrome going on to do just that for many many web standards.

"In my version of history"

It takes two seconds to find this if you weren't there when it happened. Google had a fork of Chromium with Dart VM called Dartium, it wasn't a matter of resources. Industry flipped Google off, plain and simple.

Educate yourself before making such claims, the decision to not adopt Dart wasn't because of its technical merits as a language.

The rest of your comment is just your opinion, so you do you. I'm not a Dart or Flutter devrel team to sell you their product.

[wiseowise]

Have you even used modern Dart?