61–70 of 82 posts
I haven’t yet tried KMP, but I think Kotlin in general is slept on here on HN. My experience is on the server side with both Micronaut and Spring Boot and it’s such an ergonomic language to write in. It’s probably my favorite language thus far.
I’d like to see it thrive but I’m not optimistic.
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I would argue that the shared feature set is quite reasonable. You get coroutines, you get Ktor, date/time libraries, kotlinx.serialization. You even get metaprogramming via KSP. I basically only write expect/actual implementations to talk to platform APIs, but even those, when abstracted correctly behave just like a normal API to users. You still write the UI layer natively. IMO this is a positive not a negative unl…
The JVM’s biggest feature is all the millions of great quality packages it has.
I'm puzzled why Kotlin isn't getting enough attention on HN, at least as much as Rust or Zig. Kotlin is indeed popular in it's specific domain (Android & Java). But the company is keen to position it as "write once run anywhere" space with a strong focus on multiplatform development. 1. The build system provides platform specific bindings for free (huge plus compared to the hassle of writing the core in C/C++ and the…
Learning a language isn't a huge burden. Frameworks and libraries can alleviate huge burdens. Kotlin avoids the benefits of frameworks and libraries while giving meager benefits in term of language constructs.
I really don't get the appeal of "multiplatform" rediscoveries. We already have the Multiplatform stack that is mature and truly Multiplatform: HTML+JS+CSS If you need something close to the metal, you have C and others that are multiplatform. If you want to do something slightly platform specific you loose the multiplatform claim instantly anyway. IMHO, if you are going to do something that is not an UI to an API or…
Kotlin multiplatform and compose multiplatform are about leveling the playing field a bit and giving developers more choices than this one size fits all straight jacket that is the "modern" web (I use the word modern loosely here).
And it allows people targeting mobile to target other platforms with their code bases. If it's valid to use the web on mobile, then why not use mobile frameworks on the web?
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I think modern Java has stolen a lot of Kotlin’s thunder. The differences between the languages shrink with each Java release, and server side Kotlin isn’t evangelized by its main cheerleader, google. It’s a GC language, so rust/zig are not good comps. Go, Java, Scala, Server side JS/Node, or python. These are the comps. Personally, I’ve written a number of non-trivial, server side applications in Kotlin. The extra c…
Don't forget C#/F#. Microsoft's been leaning hard into cross-platform with MAUI.
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With KMP is that you can write all your logic in one language, then reuse that in all platforms, including iOS, Android and Web. That's quite valuable if it works well. I've been trying just that at work with mixed results... The lack of a multiplatform stdlib for pure Kotlin is very tough if you need to do a lot of crypto, various serialization formats etc. so you end up writing lots of multiplatform APIs that are i…
Yeah, the library ecosystem for KMM is lacking. Also the build system used to be a headache. I haven't tried KMM recently but it was so unintuitive a year back
In fairness, KMM and KMP are still in beta and the compiler has been in the process of being overhauled. That's a process that is nearly completed but it is still ongoing. Having used the new k2 compiler with kotlin-js, it's a big upgrade in terms of performance. I expect a lot of stuff to start stabilizing post Kotlin 2.0, which should be out in later winter/spring next year. 1.9.10 is the current release. 1.9.20betas are already out. There might be a .30 but the release after that is basically 2.0. 3-6 months out basically if Jetbrains sticks to their normal release schedule.
IOS support in Compose Multiplatform is alpha quality. You shouldn't use it for anything important. But when it is done, you can expect to be able to develop applications with one code base that run nicely on Android, IOS, the web, or on desktops.
Compose web is actually targeting the new wasm compiler. Which of course is also alpha. That's an interesting one because it uses the WASM standardize GC facilities. That's currently out in browsers already but hidden behind feature flags. Which are very likely to come off soonish.
Give it a year or two. Too early to write it off now when it is basically all early access and alpha/beta quality. IMHO, there is some good tech coming together there.
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iOS dev here. What you're missing is that a ton of native-code developers (me included) aren't interested in adopting an abstraction layer that has to be tweaked to approximate the look and feel of the native OS UI layer when we could just built it natively to begin with and save all that effort. We've seen PhoneGap/Cordova, we've seen React Native and we'll keep seeing money thrown away on pretending that there aren…
The idea is you can write SwiftUI on iOS, whilst connecting to business logic written in Kotlin.
From my admittedly limited experience KMM is a complete mess. There doesn't seem to be a reasonable feature set across platforms. Even the standard library has massive holes, forcing you to littler your code with expect/actuals everywhere. This might be manageable for my own code, but completely destroys the ecosystem. A very large number of important libraries only works the JVM. Jetpack Compose and Compose Multipla…
I would argue that the shared feature set is quite reasonable. You get coroutines, you get Ktor, date/time libraries, kotlinx.serialization. You even get metaprogramming via KSP. I basically only write expect/actual implementations to talk to platform APIs, but even those, when abstracted correctly behave just like a normal API to users. You still write the UI layer natively. IMO this is a positive not a negative unl…
I'm puzzled why Kotlin isn't getting enough attention on HN, at least as much as Rust or Zig. Kotlin is indeed popular in it's specific domain (Android & Java). But the company is keen to position it as "write once run anywhere" space with a strong focus on multiplatform development. 1. The build system provides platform specific bindings for free (huge plus compared to the hassle of writing the core in C/C++ and the…
I use Kotlin daily at my job (I have to) and I'm not impressed. It is a new language that ignores most of the innovations in Programming Language Theory from the last 20 years. It only improves on Java by making the syntax less verbose and adding coroutines but almost doesn't add any benefits in terms of semantics.
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I think modern Java has stolen a lot of Kotlin’s thunder. The differences between the languages shrink with each Java release, and server side Kotlin isn’t evangelized by its main cheerleader, google. It’s a GC language, so rust/zig are not good comps. Go, Java, Scala, Server side JS/Node, or python. These are the comps. Personally, I’ve written a number of non-trivial, server side applications in Kotlin. The extra c…
Don't forget C#/F#. Microsoft's been leaning hard into cross-platform with MAUI.