I dont know if this is the right place to ask the ...

# kotlin-native

[Ivan Cagle (IvanEOD)]

I dont know if this is the right place to ask the questions I've got or not... before I unload I'll briefly describe what I'm working on and if I'm in the right place I can respond to this with more. Otherwise, please let me know, and if possible point me in the right direction! Thanks 😄

I am making a program for personal use and personal educational purposes that interacts with my Windows 10 and helps me automate and manage my desktop windows and applications. I am using a lot of stuff from com.sun.jna which is why I'm not sure if it even counts as native in this regard.

I have questions about the interactions between my code and the native code, and in particular about cleanup, especially with debugging.

Also if I could approach this with the actual Kotlin native features in a better way, I'd love any tips!

[Mikolaj]

If You are only targetting windows I would go with kotlin-native. It should be faster than JNA. But it depends on what You do, bc right now kotlin-native offers only some basic types and POSIX out of the box. The rest you would need to generate yourself with cinterop tool : https://kotlinlang.org/docs/native-c-interop.html

[Mikolaj]

https://github.com/Kotlin/kmp-native-wizard -> This sould be a good starting point

[Ivan Cagle (IvanEOD)]

Thank you for the reply 🙂
I started to play around with kotlin-native yesterday to see where it took me.. a lot of my stuff is running on the jvm and i think probably has to, I would just be using native for the interactions with the desktop... I'm not sure if there's a good way to do both?

[Mikolaj]

Unfortunately there is no interop between kotlin for JVM and kotlin native yet 😕 So at the end of the day you would still need to do JNA/JNI from your java part to the native part

There is this library that claims to make it easier but I have not tried it https://github.com/deepmedia/Knee

[Ivan Cagle (IvanEOD)]

my only idea would have been some kind of socket communication between two separate programs... but I will check that out as well and see 😄

[Mikolaj]

That's an interesting idea. Let me know if you will succeed with this, I would love to migrate away from JNI in my project 😆