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Kotlin/Native Tech Preview: Kotlin without a VM

blog.jetbrains.com

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41–50 of 79 posts

Re: Kotlin/Native Tech Preview: Kotlin without a VM

#41

Post by adl »

drampelt wrote: post #38
Entangled wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great point and I wonder if JetBrains released a free IDE for individual programmers it would help adopt their technologies wherever these programmers work. Yesterday I took a look at their tools and they are all absolutely great but I didn't download a single one since they are all 30-day trial and I am as poor as fuck. So tease me, convert me, let me use your tools for years and when the time comes I am r…

Intellij IDEA has a free community edition, but yeah, nothing free for commericial development. https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/

Depends on how you define commercial development.

You can certainly do commercial applications using Intellij IDEA CE, if you don't need Java EE, Spring, GWT, Grails, etc deep integration in the IDE.

Re: Kotlin/Native Tech Preview: Kotlin without a VM

#42

Post by saosebastiao »

jorgemf wrote: post #23
geodel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May they all do great. But I am sceptical that Scala/Kotlin and many others started in last decade stand chance against Java/Rust/Swift/Go. IMO these 4 are backed by powerful corporations and have large community momentum. They are going to keep >90% of all software work along with C/C++.

kotlin is backed by a tooling company. This is a very strong argument. The ones that are doing the best IDE for java (for a lot of people) are the ones that decided to create kotlin. Swift also has the tooling support of Apple, but I only read complains about tooling around Swift. Go and Rust are very niche compare to java or swift, while kotlin can replace java completely and now it is aiming for native backend proj…

I'm skeptical of the strategic advantage of being backed by a tooling company, because of the fact that tooling is often a preference that comes with holy wars attached. If Emacs sponsored a language, how many Vim users would jump ship? I know plenty of Java devs that actually prefer Eclipse (WTF?!?!?). Good luck getting an entire team onboard with a single IDE.

Throw in the fact that their IDE software is open source only until you need the most advanced features, and I can imagine Kotlin never picking up as much steam as Rust or Swift with their comparably inferior tooling ecosystems. I can imagine C# taking over java before Kotlin does.

Re: Kotlin/Native Tech Preview: Kotlin without a VM

#43

Post by geodel »

jorgemf wrote: post #23
geodel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May they all do great. But I am sceptical that Scala/Kotlin and many others started in last decade stand chance against Java/Rust/Swift/Go. IMO these 4 are backed by powerful corporations and have large community momentum. They are going to keep >90% of all software work along with C/C++.

kotlin is backed by a tooling company. This is a very strong argument. The ones that are doing the best IDE for java (for a lot of people) are the ones that decided to create kotlin. Swift also has the tooling support of Apple, but I only read complains about tooling around Swift. Go and Rust are very niche compare to java or swift, while kotlin can replace java completely and now it is aiming for native backend proj…

> while kotlin can replace java completely

I am not sure it can be be concluded from any data. They have come up with just a tech preview. Doing better job than Rust/Swift/Java or Go to have high perf on native platforms is going to be a huge effort. Just having a binding via LLVM is a small start.

Hope they do better but for now it seems to me that hype around it is about 2-3 magnitudes higher than the actual amount of software written in it.

Re: Kotlin/Native Tech Preview: Kotlin without a VM

#44

Post by dzonga »

vetinari wrote: post #18
geodel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May they all do great. But I am sceptical that Scala/Kotlin and many others started in last decade stand chance against Java/Rust/Swift/Go. IMO these 4 are backed by powerful corporations and have large community momentum. They are going to keep >90% of all software work along with C/C++.

Some of these corporations are experts in shooting in the foot. I wanted to read 'The Swift Programming Language (Swift 3.1 Edition)'. It is just an epub, just distributed via Apple iBooks, right? When trying to open in on an Android tablet, I found out that it is DRM-ed. Why on earth would you put DRM on a publication you want to circulate as widely as possible? Why would anyone have to read reference docs for multi…

Just the same as the book: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Sw...

Re: Kotlin/Native Tech Preview: Kotlin without a VM

#45

Post by geodel »

saosebastiao wrote: post #42
jorgemf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

kotlin is backed by a tooling company. This is a very strong argument. The ones that are doing the best IDE for java (for a lot of people) are the ones that decided to create kotlin. Swift also has the tooling support of Apple, but I only read complains about tooling around Swift. Go and Rust are very niche compare to java or swift, while kotlin can replace java completely and now it is aiming for native backend proj…

I'm skeptical of the strategic advantage of being backed by a tooling company, because of the fact that tooling is often a preference that comes with holy wars attached. If Emacs sponsored a language, how many Vim users would jump ship? I know plenty of Java devs that actually prefer Eclipse (WTF?!?!?). Good luck getting an entire team onboard with a single IDE. Throw in the fact that their IDE software is open sourc…

Absolutely. I think Kotlin might settle in a specific Java platform tooling category where a bunch of code in Java can be concisely expressed in Kotlin.

With Scala being more than a decade old, its most popular usage is Apache Spark project which is not saying much. Kotlin would first have to reach beyond Scala which itself is small percentage point of Java.

Re: Kotlin/Native Tech Preview: Kotlin without a VM

#46

Post by geodel »

taude wrote: post #33
virtualwhys wrote: post #11

> This Technology Preview features automatic reference counting with a cycle collector on top, but what the final memory management solution(s) will look like is unknown at this point. Same issue with Scala Native[1]. Both projects are a long way from being production ready wrt to targeting ios, android and desktop. Probably at least a couple of years before either project delivers the one-language-to-rule-them-all.…

I'm curious about it without even the mobile story. But just compiling command-line apps for easy distribution, similar to GoLang.

They might reach there quickly. But having a state of the art GC like Java or low memory profile like Rust/Go and high performance might take a long time.

Re: Kotlin/Native Tech Preview: Kotlin without a VM

#48

Post by chickenbane »

geodel wrote: post #16
virtualwhys wrote: post #11

> This Technology Preview features automatic reference counting with a cycle collector on top, but what the final memory management solution(s) will look like is unknown at this point. Same issue with Scala Native[1]. Both projects are a long way from being production ready wrt to targeting ios, android and desktop. Probably at least a couple of years before either project delivers the one-language-to-rule-them-all.…

May they all do great. But I am sceptical that Scala/Kotlin and many others started in last decade stand chance against Java/Rust/Swift/Go. IMO these 4 are backed by powerful corporations and have large community momentum. They are going to keep >90% of all software work along with C/C++.

> I am sceptical that Scala/Kotlin and many others started in last decade stand chance against Java/Rust/Swift/Go

In contrast to Scala, Kotlin has a much stronger focus on Java interop so its able to much better leverage the JVM ecosystem. In particular, Kotlin hits a really good sweet spot for Android development, where it can still be compatible with older JVM versions, the language features can really increase readability and reduce bugs, and the overhead isn't too dramatic.

The network effects also amplify its usefulness; JetBrains continues improving the language and its tooling; Android Studio is based on IntelliJ so the integration is also strong; more developers use the language and produce more libraries, frameworks, and ensure compatibility is excellent.

By design you can begin using Kotlin in a Java project slowly (there's even a Java->Kotlin converter), so if you are developing on a Java stack, Kotlin is worth investigating!

Re: Kotlin/Native Tech Preview: Kotlin without a VM

#49

Post by true_religion »

saosebastiao wrote: post #42
jorgemf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

kotlin is backed by a tooling company. This is a very strong argument. The ones that are doing the best IDE for java (for a lot of people) are the ones that decided to create kotlin. Swift also has the tooling support of Apple, but I only read complains about tooling around Swift. Go and Rust are very niche compare to java or swift, while kotlin can replace java completely and now it is aiming for native backend proj…

I'm skeptical of the strategic advantage of being backed by a tooling company, because of the fact that tooling is often a preference that comes with holy wars attached. If Emacs sponsored a language, how many Vim users would jump ship? I know plenty of Java devs that actually prefer Eclipse (WTF?!?!?). Good luck getting an entire team onboard with a single IDE. Throw in the fact that their IDE software is open sourc…

> Good luck getting an entire team onboard with a single IDE.

Many companies mandate that you use Visual Studio to develop with because their entire toolchain is setup to build the project via VS tools. Deviating from that means that no one can help you, and you're probably polluting the repo with your own ad-hoc tooling.

Re: Kotlin/Native Tech Preview: Kotlin without a VM

#50

Post by true_religion »

drampelt wrote: post #38
Entangled wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great point and I wonder if JetBrains released a free IDE for individual programmers it would help adopt their technologies wherever these programmers work. Yesterday I took a look at their tools and they are all absolutely great but I didn't download a single one since they are all 30-day trial and I am as poor as fuck. So tease me, convert me, let me use your tools for years and when the time comes I am r…

Intellij IDEA has a free community edition, but yeah, nothing free for commericial development. https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/

It is important to note that they don't prohibit commercial development on the community edition.

They just do not promote the community edition for commercial development.

I, for instance, could choose to use PyCharm community since I rarely use any of the tooling that comes with the 'pro edition', but when I do need something---like Cython debugging---its damned useful.

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