Hi, I am fairly enthusiastic about using Kotlin o...

# webassembly

[p2000t]

Hi,

I am fairly enthusiastic about using Kotlin on both frontend and backend.
We are used to having very fast edit-compile-run cycles with TypeScript. Fixing a typo and then seeing the result in the browser typically takes <1 second.
However, in my experiments with Kotlin (JavaScript some years ago, and now the new WASM-GC target), I get the impression that I must recompile and restart the entire application, which takes ~10 seconds for "Hello, World!", and might take a lot longer for larger ones.

Is my understanding of this situation correct? Or is there something I'm doing wrong? And is this something that is being addressed? I'm afraid it's a major show stopper for many frontend developers, so I'm hoping that my assessment is wrong :)
(My sincere apologies if this has been asked before, I couldn't find information about it.)

[hfhbd]

You can use the development tasks and use the continuous mode but it still takes some seconds for a hot reload, I guess.

[hfhbd]

There is also an incremental JS compiler option, but afaik it is still experimental.

[p2000t]

Aha, the continuous build is nice! (It still takes 10 seconds on Hello World on my machine.)
For JavaScript it also seems to work, and apparently incremental compilation is enabled by default. Unfortunately it still takes ~5 seconds for an edit-compile-run cycle.

[p2000t]

It makes you wonder where all those seconds go 🙂