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In the age of LLMs, I get why you would dump portablity in favour of close-to-the-metal Swift and Javascript codebases. However I don't really understand the need for Kotlin- surely thats just an unnecessary complication and performance hit?

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Kotlin compiles to the same JVM bytecode that Java itself does. There is no performance hit. And from a developer's perspective, no it is not a "complication", Kotlin is a much more pleasant and efficient language to program in than Java (in my opinion, and that of many others).

That's for the Android version, I would assume

Right- but why not let the LLM program directly in Java?

Because Kotlin is the primary language for Android.

Java can still be used but it's no longer the recommended choice for Android apps. For any new Android apps nowadays you start with Kotlin and Jetpack compose (made by Google).

In fact, I think Google's been saying this for 6-7 years already.

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