Interesting development from the Swift Community: ...

# multiplatform

[Justin Tullgren]

Interesting development from the Swift Community: https://www.swift.org/blog/nightly-swift-sdk-for-android/

Does anyone have insights into Jetbrains thoughts on this? (Very new so just curious)

[jw]

I'm sure they're aware of it, but it's more of a competitor to C, C++, Rust, and JavaScript in terms of code sharing.

[jw]

Maybe to some degree it could replace usages of Kotlin/Native for sharing isolated pieces of business logic, but it would suffer from living across the JNI boundary on Android whereas Kotlin has direct interop with each platform in the same memory space on both Android and iOS (and Javascript, Wasm, etc.)

[Pablichjenkov]

I believe there is a mode(talking about SKIP more specifically but is the same team) where you can use it just as a transpiler. Transpiling Swift to Kotlin directly without jni. I haven't tried but it seems like it could benefit the calling of swift third party libraries directly from Kotlin.

[Pablichjenkov]

Also consider SKIP is a paid tool

[Jonathan]

How does Kotlin avoid the JNI boundary on Android? I figured on the Android it would be no different than writing JNI bindings yourself. Is there any write-ups explaining Kotlin’s native interop magic on the JVM?

[jw]

It compiles to Java bytecode the same way Java does

[Jonathan]

If it compiles to bytecode just like Java would, then wouldn’t it have a JNI lpenalty when talking to native library, like Java currently does?

[jw]

Yes