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What does this mean for the future of KMM?

<https://www.swift.org/blog/future-of-foundation/|https://www.swift.org/blog/future-of-foundation/>

As I understand it, K/N binds to Obj-C, not Swift, which allows it to access the iOS Foundation classes as Obj-C classes. If the Foundation is rewritten in Swift, that goes away, doesn't it?

It seems to me that sooner or later, K/N will have to be bound directly to Swift for KMM to have a future, won't it? I haven't seen anything lately about Kotlin/Swift interop on the roadmap. Is JetBrains still working on that?

I've really come to like KMM, and I'd hate to see Apple pull the rug out from under it.

Interested, <@U3KSUBMEU> and <@U0E767GDA> asked the same here <https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/C9JM6Q2UX/p1670610941766059?thread_ts=1670610941.766059&amp;cid=C9JM6Q2UX|https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/C9JM6Q2UX/p1670610941766059?thread_ts=1670610941.766059&amp;cid=C9JM6Q2UX>

Yeah, I actually just noticed that. Should have occurred to me to check the <#C9JM6Q2UX|ios> channel before asking here. But maybe it'll be good to give this question a little more visibility.

I see this move by apple as an absolute win for kmm. Objc binding support creates a lot of pain points and issues. Plus nobody really wants to work with objc anymore anyways.

Oh yeah, if it pushes Swift binding forward that will be great for KMM.

To me it’s so strange that since abi stability was announced in swift what 5? 3 years ago and kotlin native has not worked on or at least made public any interop with swift. Is there a serious technical issue here? 

I looked into the internals of Swift about a year or two ago, and found that the Swift project had not fully stabilized and documented everything. Name mangling, for one, was marked as unstable. Looks like it’s stable now (as of when I checked a few months back), so it should be possible to interop directly with Swift.

Either way, I can’t imagine Apple will not include some sort of Objective-C compatibility to the new Foundation. I’d imagine we’ll see a lot of objc annotated methods and classes.

<@U2N3CF6D6> It seems that the priority is to iron out the quirks with Obj-C first, then stabilize / launch KMM 1.0 with the basics covered, then tackle Swift. It doesn’t help that the war led to St. Petersburg’s office shutdown, which AFAIK is where most of where Jetbrain’s multiplatform engineers were working at.