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Comment by Entangled | Hacker News Reader

> since it is just another JVM language

Not for long, they're working on Kotlin Native which will make it completely independent from the JVM and portable to all platforms. Killer.

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That has no value for Google. If Google wanted to get rid of JVM technology and idioms on Android then it would be better off with pure native language like Swift/Rust/Go. They all are quite further away from Javaism. Kotlin's great value is mostly because it is Java like and run on JVM.

Kotlin supports automated conversion of Java into Kotlin code.

This means you could quickly transform any existing app into a Kotlin Native app quickly.

Exactly, this sounds like just the right move to me if you're Google and would like to see a nice transition period out of the Java dependency, but until then, also support JVM. I'm sure such a move wouldn't come abruptly. Would be cool if they could get that strategic move and a more fun/productive language than Java in the same bang.

And yet Microsoft did .NET Native precisely to target mobile platforms.

Why do you think that natively compiled Kotlin would be slower than Go, anyway?

The difference being (I assume), that Microsoft has ownership of the entire .Net stdlib. The current android framework relies heavily on the java stdlib, which means that any attempt at a different language would have to bring a full rewrite of the framework itself.

That's with Kotlin's much smaller runtime. It's the stdlib that matters, not the language. Which is why the JVM or an emulated version of it will be around on Android for a long time.

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