In your opinion what is the best library for loading images to use with kotlin?

Any Java library works fine. Choose by real differences, pros and cons, after all with extension function you can make API of any library more Kotlin friendly

Coil was just released, make by the folks at Instacart https://github.com/coil-kt/coil. I haven’t actually used it yet, but it looks really nice

ImageView.setImageBitmap

Agree with @gildor but i'm also checking

Coil-kt

, looks promising

Yes, looks promising, but I think that design of some APIs is not good

The point was: for most usecases the differences with the main image loading libraries (Glide and Picasso) are pretty minor, but we always end up creating a lot of extension functions to make them more comfortable to use in kotlin. I was asking for personal experience and opinions on the matter. I didn't know about

coil

so will definitely check that one out.

I agree with @gildor regarding `Mapper`s and

loadAny

in Coil. They seem useless to me. Like the example they presented

data class Item( val id: Int, val imageUrl: String, val price: Int, val weight: Double )

class ItemMapper : Mapper<Item, HttpUrl> {
    override fun map(data: Item): HttpUrl = HttpUrl.get(data.imageUrl)
}

ImageView.loadAny(item)

could be simply written as

ImageView.load(item.imageUrl)

I don't understand why they convert the

imageUrl

to

HttpUrl

object. Am I missing something?

I think it's just an URL abstraction. Their example can be also replaced with one single extension:

fun ImageLoader.load(item: Item) = load(item.imageUrl)

And if you really want to abstract image loading details, better than abstract togethether with image loading library, if it's really necessary

I've been meaning to do an API review