Well, at the end of the day, I've managed to publi...

# webassembly

[Orfeo Ciano]

Well, at the end of the day, I've managed to publish my first Kotlin Multiplatform app
https://otacon.github.io/olpaka/
It also runs on desktop, but it's a more "crude" experience 😛

It still has a lot of rough edges, but I wanted to get something barely working out and then iterate on the idea.

Would be great to see the @Composable + @Preview in action on Intellij Idea for Compose Multiplatform projects 🙂

[Rok Oblak]

Workaround for previews:
https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/CJLTWPH7S/p1721202338084549?thread_ts=1719613328.448599&channel=CJLTWPH7S&message_ts=1721202338.084549

[Orfeo Ciano]

Life saviour!

[bashor]

Description says “A Flutter frontend app for Ollama” 🫣

[Orfeo Ciano]

You got me! The first implementation was done using Flutter. I've ported the whole thing in Kotlin multiplatform 😉
https://github.com/Otacon/olpaka/commit/37133d9f0401929a6e1fa2b61e1749b5812b41a6

[christophsturm]

this says “wheter olpaka is able to communicate with olpaka (should be ollama)“. also, why can’t I copy paste from that dialog?

[Rok Oblak]

@Orfeo Ciano would you mind listing out reasons (in short) to switch from Flutter to KMP/CMP? 🙏

[Orfeo Ciano]

Good spot @christophsturm. I've rushed the first kt release. I have a hotfix I'm working on atm and I'll bundle the change! Thanks for your valuable feedback.

[christophsturm]

do you know why marking and copying text does not work? is that because the text is not a native dom text?

[christophsturm]

ah ok the whole webpage is just a huge canvas element. thats the reason. sorry I realize it has nothing to do with your project, which looks great!

[Orfeo Ciano]

@Rok Oblak essentially I'm and Android developer so, for me, writing in Kotlin is way more simpler.

This is just my side project. I've made a little blog post about it https://otacon.github.io/olpaka/blog/releases/2024/09/28/release-v0.5.html

Essentially I am experimenting the technology on a "real" product and I'm more than keen of paying an higher compile time for a more robust programming language.

From an high level perspective, I think that flutter is more mature as a whole framework as of now, but there is a huge potential behind kotlin multiplatform. Also, as far as I've seen so far - not yet practically experimented - you can write platform-specific code using kotlin and not having to deal too much with other languages (namely js, ts, swift, ...).

Of course this is a very early analysis, only time will tell wether this is a good move or not.

[Orfeo Ciano]

Writing in Dart feels like going back to the Java 6 days and it's not as robust as Java was. Also, something I'm looking at is running UI tests without using an emulator - see roborazzi framework.

[Orfeo Ciano]

Anyways, if you have more specific questions, feel free to reach out. More than happy to answer any questions - if I can 😅

[Rok Oblak]

I'd have guessed something similar, thank you! Any visible performance differences?

[Orfeo Ciano]

Probably it's just because I can do threading much better with Kotlin than Flutter. But on my Raspberry PI I can see less stuttering and frozen frames. Haven't measured it properly, but it's noticeable at naked eye.

Also, the other little thing is that I'm not using very complex layouts, so it's very hard to tell what's the real difference at a scale.

[Rok Oblak]

Good info, thank you!

[Orfeo Ciano]

Np. I'll probably keep this channel updated when there are any major changes. I'm planning on adopting SQLDelight as soon as WASM builds are available.