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Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

As someone frequently flipping between Swift and Kotlin, while I don’t necessarily feel like Swift is massively superior, I often find myself thinking “why is this so quirky and pedantic” when writing Kotlin.

For example, I really really wish Kotlin would adopt Swift style if let/guard let statements. Kotlin smart casting doesn’t work just often enough to not be able to consistently rely on it and the foo?.let { } syntax is ugly.

Combined with the JVM warts of gradle and jankiness of code stripping and obfuscation, generally speaking if I could opt to use Swift in place of Kotlin for Android dev I would do so in a heartbeat.

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Ha, I switch between the two as well, but I feel the opposite. Kotlin is much more intuitive for me, and Swift is more clunky. I do miss guard lets in Kotlin, but that’s about it.

Have you tried Skip Tools yet?

It’s a set of tools intended to do just that.

https://skip.tools/

Skip tools is pretty cool and I very may well use it for at some point, but it works by translating Swift+SwiftUI to Kotlin+Compose and I’d prefer a more direct approach that lets me build Android binaries with Swift (preferably with the whole of UIKit available, though that’s not likely).

From the FAQ…

> Skip supports both compiling Swift natively for Android, and transpiling Swift into Kotlin. Read about Skip’s modes in the documentation.

https://skip.tools/docs/faq/#modes

Yes, it transpiles a Swift+SwiftUI codebase into a Kotlin+Compose codebase. I don’t want that intermediary step, I want the Swift itself running on Android.

> Skip supports both native mode - in which your Swift is compiled natively for Android - and transpiled mode - in which your Swift is converted to Kotlin. The mode is specified at the level of a Swift module. Each mode has strengths and weaknesses, and it is common to use both native and transpiled modules within a single Swift-on-Android app.

https://skip.tools/docs/modes/

The ?.let syntax is terrible. I don’t see how anyone thinks it’s better than doing a normal if != null check.

Feels like a lot of people like making dealing with null as complicated as possible.

The only time I ever use it is when the if != null check doesn’t work (aforementioned smart cast failure) and I don’t feel like creating a local var to fix it.

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