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Given the litigious nature of Oracle, how hard would it be for Kotlin to be useful without reference to the JVM at all? Is Kotlin/Native ready for prime time a

by mikece 6y ago

Given the litigious nature of Oracle, how hard would it be for Kotlin to be useful without reference to the JVM at all? Is Kotlin/Native ready for prime time and can it be used for mobile/embedded/IoT applications currently or is it still a work in progress?

jillesvangurp 6y ago
It's used a lot already for cross platform development for android and ios even though that has been experimental so far. This is where they've been focusing most of the effort and as far as I know it's usable for that and some people have already built apps using this. I've been looking at multiplatform development recently and maintain a few oss projects on github that are now multiplatform. The build tools are getting there. The multiplatform gradle plugin has improved a lot over the last year. Generally you can get stuff working pretty easily. If you need to target IOS and Android, it's worth a look. Also if you want to share some code with browsers, it can do that too. The main issues is with gaps in functionality. E.g. kotlinx datetime just reached 0.1. There were a few third party alternatives but if you needed dates, not having a usable datetime library is a bit annoying. That's just one example. When stuff is missing, you can actually fix it yourself. But of course that ends up being quite a bit of work. I think for e.g. command line development on Linux or WASM development for browsers, the native compiler is not that great yet. They just started working on WASM only a few weeks ago and posix and Kotlin have not had a lot of attention. This is also an issue when using kotlin-js with node.js; they've just not done the work to expose all of the built in node.js stuff to Kotlin yet. On browsers you get a smoother experience with kotlin-js. Of course people doing stuff on servers can use the jvm and that's why there's just less attention going towards native on that front. So, wouldn't recommend it for IOT just yet unless you are willing to deal with what is likely to be a rough experience and some gaps in functionality. The big next pieces are finalizing the transition to the new compiler backend and improving the multiplatform library ecosystem. They have alpha versions of the new compilers currently but they are not ready yet. I also expect there will be lots of activity with both Jetbrains and others releasing multiplatform libraries. I've actually worked on a few of those and would love to see this get traction.
BossingAround 6y ago
Doesn't OpenJDK solve your worries about JVM and Oracle being litigious?

by mikece 6y ago

jillesvangurp 6y ago

It's used a lot already for cross platform development for android and ios even though that has been experimental so far. This is where they've been focusing most of the effort and as far as I know it's usable for that and some people have already built apps using this. I've been looking at multiplatform development recently and maintain a few oss projects on github that are now multiplatform. The build tools are getting there. The multiplatform gradle plugin has improved a lot over the last year. Generally you can get stuff working pretty easily. If you need to target IOS and Android, it's worth a look. Also if you want to share some code with browsers, it can do that too. The main issues is with gaps in functionality. E.g. kotlinx datetime just reached 0.1. There were a few third party alternatives but if you needed dates, not having a usable datetime library is a bit annoying. That's just one example. When stuff is missing, you can actually fix it yourself. But of course that ends up being quite a bit of work. I think for e.g. command line development on Linux or WASM development for browsers, the native compiler is not that great yet. They just started working on WASM only a few weeks ago and posix and Kotlin have not had a lot of attention. This is also an issue when using kotlin-js with node.js; they've just not done the work to expose all of the built in node.js stuff to Kotlin yet. On browsers you get a smoother experience with kotlin-js. Of course people doing stuff on servers can use the jvm and that's why there's just less attention going towards native on that front. So, wouldn't recommend it for IOT just yet unless you are willing to deal with what is likely to be a rough experience and some gaps in functionality. The big next pieces are finalizing the transition to the new compiler backend and improving the multiplatform library ecosystem. They have alpha versions of the new compilers currently but they are not ready yet. I also expect there will be lots of activity with both Jetbrains and others releasing multiplatform libraries. I've actually worked on a few of those and would love to see this get traction.

BossingAround 6y ago

Doesn't OpenJDK solve your worries about JVM and Oracle being litigious?