So....is there a Kotlin equivalent to System?

# multiplatform

[Alfred Lopez]

So....is there a Kotlin equivalent to System?

[Benjamin Charais]

In Multiplatform if you want access to system, you would need to use expect/actual and then for each target make a specific implementation of the functionality for that individual System.

[Alfred Lopez]

k. Thanks!

[Benjamin Charais]

Feel free to reach out for more info 🙂

[Alfred Lopez]

[waving hand] This is not the answer I was looking for.....

[Alfred Lopez]

🙂

[Alfred Lopez]

Well, not what I was expecting

[Benjamin Charais]

Sadly… I feel the same, a few months ago I had to create “File” representations for 3 targets

[Alfred Lopez]

I'm in the same boat, but I'm using Korlabs korIO package

[ian.shaun.thomas]

still early days, quite a few things are missing that are kind of critical near term like Date, Locale, File and general IO, knowing details about the host such as some of what System provides.

[Alfred Lopez]

I don't know if it actually works. I'm still coding against it

[Benjamin Charais]

I looked at theirs, I cant recall what about it that didn’t fit our usecase.

[Alfred Lopez]

Lack of docs

[Alfred Lopez]

I have to read the test apps to figure out how to use it

[Alfred Lopez]

Much less, understand what they do

[Alfred Lopez]

But, I'm desparate

[Benjamin Charais]

What functionality do you need?

[Alfred Lopez]

I need to read properties files

[Alfred Lopez]

for starters

[Alfred Lopez]

I've completed the implementation with that lib, but now I'm facing the System issue

[Alfred Lopez]

since I need to read the environment vars

[Alfred Lopez]

But, perhaps I'll forego that aspect

[Benjamin Charais]

If you need env… would it be better to handle that through gradle at compile time?

[Alfred Lopez]

I need it at runtime, unfortunately

[Alfred Lopez]

We have Java, Node and mobile platforms and I need to create a lib that works on all of them

[Alfred Lopez]

I chose Kotlin because of "the promise", but I didn't realize that it can with "baggage"

[Alfred Lopez]

But all's good

[ian.shaun.thomas]

what I've done for those situations is use registration systems where the runtime can provide implementations that provide that information since System reading env variables breaks down in certain runtimes like JS web. In that kind of case, it doesn't necessarily make sense to use expect/actual if it likely can't have a reasonable actual on every target.

[ian.shaun.thomas]

interfaces rather than expect/actual

[Alfred Lopez]

Yeah, I just thought about that, but since I know this will only run in NodeJS (as well as JVM), I can use Node's process.env object