Hacker News Reader

Comment by oconnor663 | Hacker News Reader

Not needing to install/update a runtime on the target machine is an enormous win for shipping client-side software. For server-side software, maybe it's a small win. (If all you need to worry about is your own proprietary server environment, that's not a big deal, but shipping open source software that depends on the JVM leads to a lot of extra installation instructions and bug reports.)

View on HN

The latest versions of Kotlin support multiplatform programming (and hence native compilation) and this feature is actively under development. The JVM is not necessarily needed if you go that route.

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/multiplatform.html

Probably better off using Graal native-image than kotlin native at this point.

Specially since Kotlin/Native semantics are not 100% like Kotlin on the JVM.

Kotlin barely has a standard library outside of the JVM. They only recently introduced experimental io support and the concurrency model is just plaim weird.

Yes that is what I mean with semantic differences.

I watched a couple of KotlinConf talks, it appears that JetBrains wants to be the next Borland (Kotlin == Turbo Pascal), using the JVM and helped by Android to bootstrap their own eco-system.

So even with multiple platform Kotlin there is only so much that you can use from each platform when deciding to go big like that.

I don't see it working and think if they want to survive they should focus on the KVM (aka Android).

To be fair, you can bundle JVM with your app except e.g. Android.

So a solved problem since 2000.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com