What is the situation with Compose Desktop and Mac...

# compose-desktop

[Alex Styl]

What is the situation with Compose Desktop and Macs? are we going to see a native mac os target eventually?

I have received a few mentions in my own CMP libraries with people asking me to enable the target, but I see no official mention of that. No clear direction on this slack too.

[seb]

I do not think there is any aim to build a native CMP desktop target

[seb]

I am not in the CMP team and don't wanna speak for them, but I think JVM is the only desktop target

[Ivan Matkov]

CMP-9572

[Alex Styl]

Thanks for sharing Ivan. Shared some thoughts on the ticket

[Michael Paus]

@Alex Styl I do not really agree with your statement about CMP desktop development. Many of the pain points can be solved by using Nucleus and especially the upcoming version 2.0 will provide even more goodies. What real benefits would a native macOS version have? You'd just loose the whole ecosystem of Java in exchange for what?

[seb]

Tend to agree, there are good solutions like Nucleus, or Roast (less framework-like but can handle transpiling for all platforms instead of requiring a matrix of machines to build for all targets). Native CMP makes a lot less sense when you consider that. If you really need native API interactions that do not work with JNI, you can either build small native helpers (like I did in Spectre) or use Project Panama or wrappers on top of that

[Alex Styl]

I'm not here to argue whether targeting mac os makes sense or not. Feel free to start a separate discussion about it as it's OT to the OP.

I'm asking because i need to know what to reply to people opening issues on my libraries, and I shared my own experience building apps on compose desktop

[S.]

My biggest frustration around native APIs is that libraries using JNI typically extract and load them from their jar at runtime, which doesn't work for AppStore distributed apps.
Nucleus does help, but it's pointless if the libs don't provide any way to override their loading behaviour (e.g. github.com/square/zstd-kmp/issues/153)

[Michael Paus]

@seb nucleusframework.dev/native-access may be of interest for you.

[seb]

I am aware of it 🙂

[seb]

I'm asking because i need to know what to reply to people opening issues on my libraries

There is plenty of that here 🙂

[Alex Styl]

There is plenty of that here

wdym @seb? as in people asking?

[seb]

as in things to answer in issues

[אליהו הדס]

Thanks a lot, everyone!
Yes, I'm actively working on Nucleus 2.0 with its new backend, which no longer depends on AWT (while remaining backward compatible). Yesterday, I even added support for doing this natively on Wayland. 🙂

Capture vidéo du 2026-07-03 17-13-01.mp4

[אליהו הדס]

I completely agree with your point, @Alex Styl, but I don't think Kotlin/Native is the solution. For me, a desktop application without the Java ecosystem would be unbearable.