is it still the policy that kotlin native won’t su...

# kotlin-native

[Jonathan Willis]

is it still the policy that kotlin native won’t support manual memory management (https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin-native/issues/3894)

[napperley]

As a disclaimer I am not a member of the Kotlin Native team. Kotlin Native is extremely unlikely to support manual memory management considering it is targeted at nearly anything to do with native high level development (eg Linux/Embedded Linux User Space applications).

[napperley]

@Jonathan Willis - In the Issue Report all of the use cases mentioned wouldn't be supported by Kotlin Native given the design of its memory model. I am assuming you are referring to Kotlin Native's new memory model.

[Jonathan Willis]

i’m not sure what Kotlin Native’s new memory model is

[Jonathan Willis]

I’m just curious if manual memory management would ever be supported

[Jonathan Willis]

I think there’s a strong case to be made that it would be a game changer when competing with C++ and Rust

[napperley]

Kotlin Native's new memory model uses a full GC (supports multi threading unlike the old memory model), has the option to choose which GC to use (at build time), and doesn't use reference counting like the old memory model.

[napperley]

Competitors to Kotlin Native are Go ( https://go.dev/ ), Swift ( https://swift.org/ ), and possibly Scala (it is trying to partially replicate the JVM 🤣) .

[Jonathan Willis]

yeah, i know those existing competitors but it would be nice to have manual memory management as an option