Ask HN: How's your experience with Compose/Kotlin multiplatform?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310355

by _xivi • 2 years ago

3 3 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

If you use either, how is your experience with the technology? Do you use it in production? Also feel free to share your experience if you evaluated it and choose to go with something else ultimately

Compose multiplatform is new but seems good with many projects on GitHub. I found it more attractive than flutter but previous release announcemnts didn't get much attention here, the top one I could find has like 3 comments

scosman2• 2 years ago

I did an experiment with Kotlin Multiplatform.

1) Tooling for compiling/building was great

2) Most libraries I needed assumed Android Kotlin, and realized the multi-platform ecosystem is much much much smaller than the Kotlin ecosystem. Almost none of the big projects had support/CI/tests on multiplatform (even though most could). Lots of little dependancy bugs to chase down. This part was a deal breaker. Maybe it's gotten better, but this was only a year ago.

Went with go mobile instead. Amazing ecosystem (and everything just works), mediocre tooling (I've had to patch the project).

_xivi• 2 years ago

Thanks for sharing

So it was death by a thousand cuts kind of thing

scosman2• 2 years ago

Kinda. Did a dummy project in a few languages to see what I wanted to use for the big project.

Looked at Go, Swift, Kotlin MP, and Rust.

I liked Kotlin tools, and small binary size. If I knew I wasn't going to need more libraries in the future I might pick it.

Go is great, although binaries a bit large with the runtime packed in, and TinyGo too limiting.

Rust: I couldn't find a good multi-language binding package so I skipped it... then later found https://github.com/mozilla/uniffi-rs It could be a top contender.

Ask HN: How's your experience with Compose/Kotlin multiplatform?

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