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Comment by akerro | Hacker News Reader

I actually wish there was an Android release targeted for Dart support with more Dart promotion. Since this year Java got a lot more powers, they're moving the language and ecosystem much faster, functional targets for Java 12 (will be released in 2019) contain almost everything Kotlin has now.

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Given the legal wrangling with Oracle, I don't think they will be eager to support Java. However, Kotlin has a native compiler (llvm based) as well. You can target Android/IOS with it as well as Wasm or simple desktop/server executables. So, the smart move would be to deemphasize Dart, move flutter on top of Kotlin native/llvm (and why not expose it to other languages as well; e.g. swift). Then they cab move the entire Android ecosystem on top of llvm and provide some level of continuity for people with Kotlin/Android codebases.

The main challenge here is the API gap between the old java 6 APIs that underly the current Android API that won't be there on native Kotlin. Flutter solves that problem.

Do you have anything specific in mind about Oracle-Java? They opensource a lot in the last two years, OracleJava is basically 99.9% openJDK now, the main JDK is OpenJDK, Flight Recorder is open-source, graalVM is GPL2...

The problems between oracle and google are related to copyright and APIs. Androids OSS java bits are licensed differently(Apache license if I recall correctly) and technically a partially API compatible implementation of Java about 10 years ago with lots of Google specific additions and some code inherited from IBMs harmony project.

In any case, compiler technology has moved forward a lot and as Apple has been showing with IOS and Swift, you can do some pretty decent app ecosystem around native code without having to expose your developers to doing C/C++.

But then it depends how much is dependent on changes on the JVM and how much will get into the Android VM. This nice thing of Kotlin is that you get a nice language which is JVM 6 compatible and thus supported on most Android platforms. The last information I have from Android is that you can use partially features from Java7/JVM7 but not all of them.

Yeah, I was expecting to see Dart given more prominence, but guessing the momentum Kotlin has and the comparative ease of moving that way from pure Java, the timings still aren't working out.

Am only tinkering at the moment, but my excitement for Flutter means any push in the Dart direction is good for me.

You must have not written much Kotlin then as no, it really won't come close still. Even if they manage to get everything planned in for 12 - which they won't - most will still wait for the next LTS anyway.

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