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Comment by 11thEarlOfMar | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to hear from Swift Devs who also need to support Android. What does the landscape for cross development look like today, and what is the prognosis? Is open source Swift going to lead to a truly cross-platform tool set any time soon?

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You don't have many choices for cross-platform tools. You can either use C++ that is quite hard for a lot of people but I would say most popular and most stable. You can use C# or Java with Xamarin but it is very expensive, unstable and it is kind vendor lock-in. You can also use JavaScript but you will lose a lot of performance that is very important on mobile. There are other options like using Lua, RubyMotion but they suffer same problems as JavaScript

Bottom line: There isn't convenient, modern, fast, open-source method for cross-platform development.

Swift bridges nicely with C and it is built on LLVM so you will be able to use it on Android with Android NDK and bridge it through JNI and Microsoft recently also adopted LLVM so you will be also able to use it there.

> Bottom line: There isn't convenient, modern, fast, open-source method for cross-platform development.

React Native

It is far from perfect, maybe one day. Currently it still suffers a lot of problems. Try to write a big application in it and you will soon discover it.

Care to elaborate?

You can use Go with gomobile https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Mobile#sdk-applications-an... . It works okay but the lack of support for exporting slices really limits things.

> You can also use JavaScript but you will lose a lot of performance that is very important on mobile.

I've used Appcelerator Titanium fairly extensively. The performance difference vs. native code is undiscernible. Unfortunately, JavaScript is an awful language to use, so there are tradeoffs. Maybe Titanium + TypeScript would be the sweet spot.

It depends what you do but once you have a complex application you will see problems with JavaScript.

I've had the complete opposite experience with Titanium, to the point where it was completely unusable.

I found some things about it to be frustrating and buggy, but it was still less work than writing two different apps. My code was about 90% shared between devices.

How does RubyMotion suffer the same (performance) problems as JavaScript? Doesn't it compile to C# bytecode?

It actually uses the MacRuby stuff to compile to native. But the compiler can't optimize nearly as well as it can for statically typed languages, so there's a pretty significant performance hit on the ruby code itself, though once you've called a native library there won't be any difference.

> Bottom line: There isn't convenient, modern, fast, open-source method for cross-platform development.

There is ActionScript 3

even if you think that "flash is dead" in the browser, for mobile and Desktop you can use Adobe AIR

for server-side, command-line and shell scripts you use Redtamarin https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin

I'm the dev behind redtamarin but I welcome other projects like perfect.

Even if the tech and language are different, different pros and cons, a lot of ideas and features are shared.

It's pretty easy, on iOS we use swift, my Android team uses java, my web team uses ruby.

I switch fluidly between rails and swift, and I leave the java dev to those who enjoy it.

I haven't really used it myself, but there is RemObjects Elements (http://www.elementscompiler.com/elements/silver/).

Maybe Apportable will eventually have Swift support.

You're never going to have a truly cross platform tool set. The UI/UX paradigms are just too different.

There are already several solutions for sharing library code for business logic between the platforms, either using C++, or compiling Java to Objective-C, and that's about as good as you're gonna get.

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