The legacy backend is deprecated it Kotlin 1.8. Sh...

# kvision

[Robert Jaros]

The legacy backend is deprecated it Kotlin 1.8. Should KVision 6 be still compiled in both mode to support the legacy backend?

[Robert Jaros]

@Miguel Vera Belmonte can you please state why do you need the legacy backend?

[Miguel Vera Belmonte]

HI @Robert Jaros, we’ve got some weird bugs with the IR compiler in our product that we still haven’t managed to isolate. This is happening for us in 1.7.21, we still haven’t tried with 1.8-beta, though. We’re planning to update to IR, and ideally, if that doesn’t hinder the development of KVision, we’d like to keep using the legacy backend until we manage to pinpoint those bugs.

[Miguel Vera Belmonte]

I’ll try tomorrow to compile with 1.8.0-beta and let you know if those bugs are still there!

[Robert Jaros]

Any luck trying 1.8?

[Miguel Vera Belmonte]

Hi @Robert Jaros no luck yet, in fact I haven’t even managed to compile our project yet; I seem to be hitting some kind of bug with KSP on 1.8.0-Beta:

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* What went wrong:
Could not determine the dependencies of task ':compileKotlinFrontend'.
> Could not create task ':kspCommonMainKotlinMetadata'.
   > Could not create task of type 'KspTaskMetadata'.
      > org/jetbrains/kotlin/gradle/dsl/KotlinMultiplatformCommonOptionsImpl

I’ll keep trying to see if it is truly a bug or something that I’m doing wrong…

[Robert Jaros]

Could you share the code of your project?

[Miguel Vera Belmonte]

No bother, after a few tries I saw that the dependency of KVision 5.17 was pulling KSP 1.7.20-1.0.7. After upgrading to KVision 6.0.0-Beta the error disappeared.

Our project is compiling and working now with KVision 6 and Kotlin 1.8 🙂 There are a lot of graphical glitches, don’t know why, but we’ll eventually sort those out, I’m sure.

In any case, one thing that still worries me about making the jump is the compatibility of source maps with the IR compiler; last time I checked it wasn’t great, to say the least… We are able right now to debug quite easily in legacy mode thanks to the sourcemap compatibility. Do you know if the debugging experience in IR is comparable?

[Robert Jaros]

Unfortunately I can't compare, because I don't do a lot of debugging with source maps (I have them disabled and it's usually faster to add some `console.log`s then reconfiguring and rebuilding the whole project 😉)