Ask HN: Best language to share code between an Android and iOS app?

#1

Post by mevorah » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 3:52 PM UTC

Hello app developers of HN!

My team owns an Android (Kotlin) and iOS (Swift) app. The app is responsible for processing data, submitting to ML models, and then displaying results in a UI. We chose to do a lot of that processing in a shared Rust component. What we have found is a high overhead of bridging Kotlin/Swift to Rust. Some core logic has also seeped into our bridging code resulting in some duplication (exactly what we were trying to avoid).

With that, those of you who have found yourselves in similar situations, which language would you choose to be shared between your Android and iOS app (if any)?

Re: Ask HN: Best language to share code between an Android and iOS app?

#2

Post by shams93 » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

I use c++ rather than rust because as much as I would love to use the best language its just not so well supported on mobile compared to c/c++. I'm not sure how well flutter ffi does using rust compared to more mainstream approaches its possible that flutter ffi is more friendly to rust than jni/kotlin.

Re: Ask HN: Best language to share code between an Android and iOS app?

#3

Post by cerberusss » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 7:10 PM UTC

Have you seen this answer on Stack Overflow? https://stackoverflow.com/a/5234868

Re: Ask HN: Best language to share code between an Android and iOS app?

#4

Post by karmakaze » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 11:46 PM UTC

One way would be to host a script engine and run the script language, e.g. JavaScript. Another would be to create your own grammar and simultaneously translate to Kotlin and Swift. You could even use a strict subset of either Kotlin or Swift then you'd only have to deal with one translator.

Re: Ask HN: Best language to share code between an Android and iOS app?

#5

Post by stockkid » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 2:51 AM UTC

In Go, there is an official, experimental project called gomobile [0] that allows one to generate a Java or Objective C binding to be used in mobile projects based on Go source code.

It comes with some restrictions and is still deemed experimental. But it could be a viable choice in the days to come.

[0] https://github.com/golang/mobile

Re: Ask HN: Best language to share code between an Android and iOS app?

#6

Post by JaggerJo » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 8:55 AM UTC

F# with Xamarin.Android + Xamarin.Ios

Re: Ask HN: Best language to share code between an Android and iOS app?

#7

Post by jamil7 » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 5:26 PM UTC

I'm not an expert but you could consider sharing Swift (or Kotlin) code between platforms. Nim (https://nim-lang.org) could also be explored.

Re: Ask HN: Best language to share code between an Android and iOS app?

#8

Post by thescribbblr » Sun, Oct 27, 2019, 6:18 AM UTC

JaggerJo wrote: post #6

F# with Xamarin.Android + Xamarin.Ios

I used the same once a long ago

Re: Ask HN: Best language to share code between an Android and iOS app?

#9

Post by W0lf » Sun, Oct 27, 2019, 6:27 AM UTC

I did one cross iOS/Android platform project using Kotlin/Native with its MPP plugin with reasonable success. However, this was 6 months ago and the JetBrains people surely haven‘t stopped moving forward.

Re: Ask HN: Best language to share code between an Android and iOS app?

#10

Post by me551ah » Sun, Oct 27, 2019, 6:27 AM UTC

Just use JavaScript.

Javascriptcore is a lightweight way to execute JavaScript on iOS and you can use V8 context or duktape on Android. This way you can also update code in your app without an app store update.