Something I haven't seen in the various articles/presentations about Kotlin switching to a native WA...

# multiplatform

[cedric]

Something I haven't seen in the various articles/presentations about Kotlin switching to a native WASM back end is: what was found insufficient in the existing LLVM back end? LLVM performs some really incredible optimizations in the assembly it generates, and it gets better every day, so I wonder if the Kotlin team can keep up with all the efforts going into LLVM, and whether it's time well spent...

[russhwolf]

I don't know in detail, but I think a part of it was to be able to integrate with the WASM garbage collector instead of Kotlin/Native supplying its own.

[russhwolf]

This was the initial announcement of the separate backend which has a bit of context https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/CDFP59223/p1594049904021800

[cedric]

Thanks for the context, @russhwolf!