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Comment by kodablah | Hacker News Reader

I have used Kotlin Native a good bit now, and it feels quite natural and easy to use. FFI with nullable pointers fits quite well with the language's compile time null checks. I found it much easier to use than Scala Native, especially as a Windows dev. I am a bit sad they chose CLion as their IDE, but I understand why.

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I really want to like CLion (it's pretty good, honestly) except I cannot stand CMake as a build system. Being able to use Kotlin Native with it sounds quite nice, because then I don't have to deal with CMake. It's a pretty solid IDE.

Is there a better alternative to CMake? I find its syntax painful and inconsistent, but once a project is configured, it works reasonably well for producing cross-platform builds.

Ostensibly there are dozens, since it feels like everyone makes their own….

Honestly most of the time I use autotools. I hate autotools, but it breaks less often and is usually easier to fix when it does. CMake will occasionally just refuse to find dependencies or will generate bad makefiles for me on less-common OSes like QNX and even on the BSDs.

I did use Premake for a time which is basically like CMake with less awful syntax and doesn't pollute all your subdirectories with files. Don't expect it to work on OSes other than Windows/Mac/common Linuxes though.

All of my Kotlin Native work was able to leverage Gradle and the konan plugin. I do not know the quality of Groovy support in CLion, but it is decent in IntelliJ.

What do you dislike about CLion? I don't really use C so I thought the minor issues I had with my toy projects wouldn't really translate over to people who professionally use the tools and know the ins and out of the language.

I guess the reason is that it isn't available for free.

It it is an understandable decision, as they aren't a charity.

However they aren't also an OS vendor, so it remains to be seen how it will evolve.

I was hoping to leverage multiplatform work primarily using the JVM and only dipping into native-specific code here and there, but this makes it difficult. It's not like they force me to use/buy WebStorm to use Kotlin JS.

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