If some kind of FFI happens through LLVM then we will have a lot of useful libraries like database connectors, server libraries ready to use

But rather than waiting for these useful details to be done, I strongly believe that a working native runtime should be released with stdlib so the community starts making use of it. Then you'll start getting inputs for crazy use-cases

@kevinherron the problem is that the jdk is not only a vm but also a very nice stdlib. I wouldn't want to miss that for certain tasks, even if compiling to native would mean better performance.

That's once of my biggest concerns with Kotlin native right now

@kirillrakhman libraries will take time to mature but for the starters many system level things can be done with ease in native

I know, but I would rather use a HttpUrlConnection than a system call just to download some json

Not to mention okhttp

@kirillrakhman note that intstead of JDK libs you will get access to whole range of C libraries via interop functionality. but thanks for sharing the concern

yes absolutely

but another concern of mine is build tool with package management. I realize Gradle can build C++ projects which means it might be tailored to build kotlin native but it’s performance and memory consumption is awful

something basic to begin with like swift SPM or cmake might help.

so... say I have some C-only library. How would I import that to use with Kotlin?

@benleggiero if you mean Kotlin for JVM, just use normal JNI, see

external

keyword https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/java-interop.html#using-jni-with-kotlin if you mean Kotlin compiling to native code, it’s not available yet.

@orangy Hi, what about of status kotlin-native? Works in progress, you hire developers or what?

It’s work in progress.

Writes prototypes or just thinking about concept?

active development (in a private repo)

https://developer.android.com/things/hardware/developer-kits.html. Another target platform for Kotlin native. I think it readily supports llvm because of ndk toolchain (not sure though)

One NDK at a time, please 😉

Android Things uses mostly the same stack as common Android. So it mostly Java Android SDK, so you can use it now with kotlin-jvm And, as common Android, Things of course also supports NDK, but it’s mostly the same NDK, no special Things bindings as I know but SDK has Things Support Library But anyway, support of Android NDK would be a huge thing (pun!) for us and I think anyone who has Kotlin in SDK side and C++ in NDK The pure Kotlin stack for Android… mmm 😻 K

Yeah. Kotlin support in and out of dalvik.

World domination plan 😜

when will it be released ? next few month ? this year? 😛

No specific timeline, but we hope to show something to public this year.

year could be anything out of 10 big remaining months

they look big when you’re waiting 😄

As a teaser, here is stand-up message from one of the members of native subteam:

I was a little bored today, so I wrote a simple echo server using interop and UNIX sockets. It works.

I'm not sure if teasers are good or bad, the hype train is huge!

teasers allow us to share progress without taking any responsibility 😉

😄