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Comment by skinnyasianboi | Hacker News Reader

Kotlin native/multiplatform projects is the answer

It's _very_ early, though, as well.

There's not much of an ecosystem for multiplatform yet for desktop projects at all. For macOS you have a way of "making a framework you can use" and that's about it.

There is a lot of promise, though, in the mobile space: https://touchlab.co/touchlab-square-kotlin-multiplatform-col...

My sense is that as the mobile multiplatform space gets ironed out, the desktop space will benefit.

Though generally speaking, Kotlin/Native has a _much_ lower level of "institutional" risk, since the Kotlin approach doesn't subvert the control Apple or Microsoft have over their platforms. Flutter, on the other hand, seems to abstract it away.

You still need some gui library/framework. What crossplatform options do you have?

Kotlin is by JetBrains.

Its not though.. the only IDE is CLion which does not have a free version. Thats a showstopper for a lot of people.

Its also pretty slow compared with other native solutions.

It actually works really well in IntelliJ Community Edition. There is a template for creating a new Kotlin/Native project, the auto-completion works and there is even unit testing support! Things have come a long way since the early days of compiling your own cinterop stubs and figuring out APIs from the generated wrappers. :)

If you want a debugger you need CLion, though. And the compiler is really, really slow – but they seem to be working on benchmarking things recently, so presumably it will be improved.

I'm tired of long compilation and failing compiler ;)

What are some of the strengths you enjoy about Kotlin?

Exactly. Kotlin for all platforms is the best option for the future.

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