Hacker News Reader

You could also do this with JavaScript correct? Node.js back end with whatever front end framework and then use something like react native for mobile?

View on HN

But then you'd be writing JavaScript and who wants that. TypeScript is maybe ok-ish but TS is just putting a lipstick on a pig. Like, ignoring other issues, JVM at least has decent concurrency and with quasar, you get processes similar to erlang.

What about the other side of that coin. Does a small amount of idiomatic Kotlin compile down to a small amount of JS, or a large amount (in bytes, after gzip)?

I don't have extensive experience with it but it's not too bad compared with other JS transpilers.

That's not quite there though - with React Native, your still running the js engine to run the JavaScript (but your at least using native widgets).

With Kotlin you'll be running compiled code. If you wanted to right now though, you could (should be able to?) use Kotlin to build a React Native app with it's just target.

I was looking into this yesterday. Apparently while there's support for transpiling Kotlin -> JS, more work would be needed to support transpiling for react native[1]. Not sure why.

[1] https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2017/04/use-kotlin-with-np...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com