For those that don’t know there was an internal JetBrains project a while back that had a Kotlin program (using a custom version of Kotlin) running in user space as part of a custom x86 OS running in QEMU. The entire kernel is written in C. There is an effort to port Kotlin to ARM based uCs via Kotlin Native. One key part of the porting process would involve having a Kotlin program running on a Uc without an OS (direct communication with the hardware). Many alternative programming languages for embedded development made the fundamental mistake of requiring a OS and VM in order to run a program, which uses far too many resources on a uC.
Have provided some thoughts about Kotlin for embedded development in an article that I wrote.
People who are capable of writing in C/C++ have my greatest respect. That being said, at some point: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Languages like Go, Rust and Swift all tackle and fix problems that the C-family introduced while also adapting the most praised features but avoid going the VM’d route that Java pioneered. Kotlin’s native port is just another example of that, and we need it. For more choice, and ways to express yourself without the limitations of whoever is in control of VM’d platform, like the JVM, and those people have no problem suing.
Kotlin will be more popular if there is an approach like Kotlin Native, because that means we finally have an elegant solution for cross-platform development, and one of them is native supported (android).
That will be a huge advantage for Kotlin, because one language to rule mobile world is very hot topic.
Can’t believe why people here not seeing its benefits, do you really think that your back-end community is already big enough to take over the whole coding world and make Kotlin the most popular language!!!..
Awesome! Bring on the Kotlin native! I’m loving the KMP solutions already! Forget all the sour grapes here! People will always complain about something, it’s a universal constant.
