Are there any plans written out for Kotlin Native for future

Question

Are there any plans written out for Kotlin Native for future development related to potential features like bitcode support or generics I didn t find anything on the repo or by skimming the blog

gildor · Answer

One message above <https github com JetBrains kotlin native pull 1564>

gildor · Answer

As I know current plan to have smooth ObjC interop so no generics only for collections direct Swift interop as I understand is not in work now and requires some additional consideration

AndreasBackx · Answer

What do you mean with direct Swift interop I m definitely no Swift expert by any stretch of the imagination

AndreasBackx · Answer

We re currently looking at some options for a shared library between Android and iOS

gildor · Answer

Because there are no generics in ObjC

gildor · Answer

but Kotlin Native goal is ObjC interop because it allows to use K N from Swift and ObjC and use ObjC API all iOS APIs as I understand

gildor · Answer

K N has limited generics supports for collections to be type safe for Swift but full blown swift generics support is not so easy as I know

gildor · Answer

So direct Swift interop means for K N to generate some Swift specific bindings not only ObjC specific

AndreasBackx · Answer

Hmmm is there any way to compile from Swift to Kotlin or something for shared libraries We re looking at some stuff but there isn t a whole lot available and documentation is lacking on the projects that we do find

gildor · Answer

compile from Swift to Kotlin What do you mean

gildor · Answer

K N can be compiled to iOS framework

gildor · Answer

and can be used from Swift

gildor · Answer

This is an example how to share code between Android iOS and JVM <https github com JetBrains kotlin native tree bd506c527a5ecb60b7e1e524571590a794b250e6 samples calculator>

AndreasBackx · Answer

We had a look at some examples I think the best thing to do is to just try it out and see whether it works for us Thank you slightly smiling face

AndreasBackx · Answer

Is there any documentation available though when it comes to separating the shared library Android code and iOS code I assume that the shared library can be made available on an internal Maven repo but is that also possible for iOS not Maven I assume then

gildor · Answer

What do you mean separating the shared library

gildor · Answer

It s not actually shared library like ` so` so you do not share binaries for Android and iOS this approach based on Kotlin Multiplatform Projects <https kotlinlang org docs reference multiplatform html>

gildor · Answer

So you compile your project for each platform and get separate results aar for Android framework for iOS You can publish aar to Maven for iOS probably make sense to publish as CocoaPod otherwise not sure how would you use this dependency from maven on iOS

AndreasBackx · Answer

Yes I don t mean ` so` shared libraries I mean separate builds Alright I ll have a look around on how to publish it as a CocoaPod But that s what I was looking for whether it was possible at all

gildor · Answer

result of K N compilation is binary iOS framework so should be possible to publish as a CocoaPod but never tried

gildor · Answer

Also I would start not from publishing but just from compilation and add framework to your iOS project manually just to be sure that everything is fine

AndreasBackx · Answer

Alright will do Thank you

yusuf3000 · Answer

Andreas we re using K N to build a cross platform framework to be used in our android and ios apps We ve also delivered the framework as a cocoapod to be used by the mobile UI team Let me know if you have any questions

AndreasBackx · Answer

< yusuf3000> how do you handle versioning between the shared library and one of the apps Are you using a Git submodule or something But I haven t heard the greatest thing about them

AndreasBackx · Answer

I tried out companion objects but it s a bit clunky because it s a separate object that you have to instantiate Will this be converted to static in the future

yusuf3000 · Answer

We re using cocoapods to handle versioning for the iOS app We wanted to avoid git submodules too

AndreasBackx · Answer

But what do you do if you need to go back to a previous release to fix a bug and you need to work on the shared library as well

yusuf3000 · Answer

Using companion objects isn t too bad You can write `CompanionObject init ` which will give you the non companion object I m also aware that there is a github issue where the syntax will become nicer from the ios side but it will be the same functionality

AndreasBackx · Answer

Also how do you handle stuff like datetime seems like something crucial

yusuf3000 · Answer

Our K N framework isn t being used in production yet so we haven t come across this issue yet but yes it s something for us to think about too

yusuf3000 · Answer

You can use the `expect` `actual` feature of Kotlin MPP to use the platform api s for things like Date and Time

yusuf3000 · Answer

that s what we have done in our project