Book Image

Simplifying Application Development with Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile

By : Róbert Nagy
Book Image

Simplifying Application Development with Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile

By: Róbert Nagy

Overview of this book

Sharing code between platforms can help developers gain a competitive edge, and Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM) offers a sensible way to do it. KMM helps mobile teams share code between Android and iOS in a flexible way, leaving room for native development. The book begins by helping you to gain a clear understanding of the Kotlin Multiplatform approach, how it works, and how it is different from cross-platform technologies, such as React Native and Flutter, and code sharing options, such as C++. You'll then see how your team can use this software development kit (SDK) to build native applications more effectively by learning timeless concepts and working through practical examples. As you advance, you'll get to grips with the core concepts, understand why UI sharing fails, and get hands-on with developing a small KMM application. Finally, you'll discover expert tips and best practices, along with production- and adoption-related questions, that will help you take the next step in your project and career. By the end of this Kotlin book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of the capabilities of KMM and be able to share code between Android and iOS flexibly.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1 - Getting Started with Multiplatform Mobile Development Using Kotlin
5
Section 2 - Code Sharing between Android and iOS
10
Section 3 - Supercharging Yourself for the Next Steps

Managing concurrency

Important Note

Starting with Kotlin 1.6.10, the new memory model is enabled by default, with the official multithreaded coroutines library available for Kotlin/Native. This change makes the following overview and the freezing concept in Kotlin/Native obsolete. While you may bump into the freezing model until the new memory model becomes stable, a pragmatic approach would be revisiting/reading up on freezing-related concepts when the need arises.

In the previous chapters, we saw how Kotlin/Native's concurrency model differs from JVM and that while a new model is being made, it will probably take some time until it's stable. In this section, we'll explore some of the more common concurrency issues that people have and what best practices you can follow to avoid them.

As a quick reminder about Kotlin/Native's concurrency rules, you can only share immutable states between threads. This is done at runtime and is referred to as a frozen state...