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

Kotlin compilers in general

First, let's make sure we are on the same page and have a basic understanding of how compilers and the Kotlin compiler work in general.

A compiler is a program that translates computer code in a given programming language into machine code or lower-level code. Compilers generally consist of two components:

  • Frontend
  • Backend

A frontend compiler deals with programming-language specifics, such as parsing the code, verifying syntax and semantic correctness, type checking, and building up the syntax tree. Generally, there is one frontend compiler and as many backend compilers as there are targets.

A backend compiler takes an intermediate representation (IR) of the code that's produced by the frontend compiler and creates an executable based on the IR. This can be run on the specific target while running certain optimizations.

In Kotlin, there are three different backend compilers: one for each of the Java virtual machine ...