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I’ve seen this used in a number of mobile shops when they need/want native frontends and to want share business logic, db use, networking etc. (My only gripe is

I’ve seen this used in a number of mobile shops when they need/want native frontends and to want share business logic, db use, networking etc. (My only gripe is that Kotlin more or less forces you to use IJ and gradle but most are happy with that). It’s been mature for a while now but has never seemed to get much airtime probably because a lot of mobile companies are happy to deal with non native Flutter/React trade offs.

palata 3y ago
> probably because a lot of mobile companies are happy to deal with non native Flutter/React trade offs. Most mobile companies I know do native Android/iOS development instead of using cross-platform frameworks.
- tarkin2 3y ago
  I'm more wondering why this isn't more popular, at least with this crowd.
  - occz 3y ago
    One reason could be that people have been burned a few times too many by technologies promising the world with regards to cross-platform, and then failing to deliver on their promises. I think KMP could potentially be good enough to fly, but time will definitely tell on that.
    - palata 3y ago
      IMO cross-platform frameworks are "write once, debug everywhere". In my experience: 1. That's not particularly faster than writing native apps, but debugging is much more frustrating than writing native apps. So as a developer, cross-platform sucks, native dev is fun. 2. Desktop and Mobile are fundamentally different, so trying to write one app for both gives the worst of both worlds. Don't do that. 3. The "debug everywhere" part of cross-platform gets worse as the app gets more complicated. So the app is fundamentally getting more and more frustrating for the devs, which... well nobody wants. On the other hand, sharing code (or libraries) between platforms sometimes makes sense. And being able to do that in Kotlin instead of, say, C++ (or Rust, I know) is actually cool.
karmakaze 3y ago
> Build and runtime performance improvements > - Gradle configuration cache support speeds up the build process by reusing the results of the configuration phase for subsequent builds. Any idea why configuration is so slow that it benefits greatly from caching? Is Gradle really that slow? Or is this for very complex configurations that requires probing everything about the platform, in which case I suppose there's no cross-platform development.
- ahoka 3y ago
  Gradle is really kinda slow. There are no non-complex Gradle configurations outside of hello world examples either. If you have a huge project (where the small inefficiencies diminish) and working caching, it can be ok.

palata 3y ago

> probably because a lot of mobile companies are happy to deal with non native Flutter/React trade offs. Most mobile companies I know do native Android/iOS development instead of using cross-platform frameworks.

tarkin2 3y ago
I'm more wondering why this isn't more popular, at least with this crowd.
- occz 3y ago
  One reason could be that people have been burned a few times too many by technologies promising the world with regards to cross-platform, and then failing to deliver on their promises. I think KMP could potentially be good enough to fly, but time will definitely tell on that.
  - palata 3y ago
    IMO cross-platform frameworks are "write once, debug everywhere". In my experience: 1. That's not particularly faster than writing native apps, but debugging is much more frustrating than writing native apps. So as a developer, cross-platform sucks, native dev is fun. 2. Desktop and Mobile are fundamentally different, so trying to write one app for both gives the worst of both worlds. Don't do that. 3. The "debug everywhere" part of cross-platform gets worse as the app gets more complicated. So the app is fundamentally getting more and more frustrating for the devs, which... well nobody wants. On the other hand, sharing code (or libraries) between platforms sometimes makes sense. And being able to do that in Kotlin instead of, say, C++ (or Rust, I know) is actually cool.

karmakaze 3y ago

> Build and runtime performance improvements > - Gradle configuration cache support speeds up the build process by reusing the results of the configuration phase for subsequent builds. Any idea why configuration is so slow that it benefits greatly from caching? Is Gradle really that slow? Or is this for very complex configurations that requires probing everything about the platform, in which case I suppose there's no cross-platform development.

ahoka 3y ago
Gradle is really kinda slow. There are no non-complex Gradle configurations outside of hello world examples either. If you have a huge project (where the small inefficiencies diminish) and working caching, it can be ok.