Is reflection handled differently between Android and iOS with Kotlin Multiplatform? Accessing the any member val from KClass returns "Unresolved reference: <name>" when building the iOS variant, but doesn't complain for the Android variant. I've tried also adding the reflect dependency in case.

Most of the KClass members are JVM only: https://kotlinlang.org/api/latest/jvm/stdlib/kotlin.reflect/-k-class/

interesting. Is there any example on how to achieve instance creation from KClass on non-JVM platforms?

I'm not sure but I would think it is not possible.

Reflection in native is mostly non-existent. Projects like kotlinx-serialization use annotations and code generation to get the job done on iOS.

Got it, thanks

Kotlin/Native is a lot more like Swift than the JVM in that respect. Very little reflection and dynamic interaction with classes.

@Alberto Reflection is a form of meta programming. You may find that you can get similar results with Compiler Plugins, another form of meta programming that will be supported (eventually) on all Kotlin platforms.

Got it, I was trying to implement something like a component registry / service locator to be used across Android/iOS but sounds like may want to use something different, perhaps like DI via Koin, unless there's other recommendations

Koin builds its registry up with closures that construct objects rather than reflection.

I've had a good experience with Koin, though correct me if I'm wrong @Sam. I thought Koin does call

getKClass

somewhere internally

My experience with it is only on Android. On iOS I use a Coordinator to build up my dependency graph and pass it into the ViewControllers/ViewModels.

I wrote the koin native implementation! It does use kclass, but reflection is just nowhere near as dynamic on native. I forget the details at the moment on how it resolves, but it’s different than the jvm for sure.

You actually can pass Swift things to Koin if you cast to

Any

first to avoid KClass issues, but then you lose type safety and need to use qualifiers to manually distinguish things. Much cleaner if you wrap in a Kotlin object.

@zsperske could you pls explain more in detail how do you “wrap swift objects into kotlin object” ?

via delegation

For that specific use-case you might be overcomplicating things. If

DatabaseDriver

is a Kotlin type then as long as you cast to that in your Koin code you probably don't need the wrapper. eg you could define

fun configureKoin(databaseDriver: DatabaseDriver) {
  startKoin(modules(module {
    ...
    single { databaseDriver }
  }))
}

and then call

configureKoin()

from Swift. But if

DatabaseDriverIos

doesn't implement a Kotlin interface then you'd want a wrapper like

class DatabaseDriverWrapper(val databaseDriverIos: DatabaseDriverIos)

to be able to bind it to Koin. (sorry to take this thread off the rails)

Thanks for you answers @zsperske and @russhwolf. In my particular case I need to use AWS native libs with “nice” callback APIs so I’ve already gave up on putting them in the common part. My current implementation use technique “ServiceRegistry” with lambdas in the same manner as “DroidconApp”. Works fine, but I like the idea of wrapper seeding in iosMain, so I will give it an another try. Just for the sake of consinstency in an usage of Koin