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

The Kotlin/Native compiler

The Kotlin/Native backend compiler is an LLVM-based compiler (the abbreviation stands for low-level virtual machine, which was officially deprecated to avoid any confusion since LLVM now means more than just a virtual machine (VM); we're talking about LLVM IR, LLVM debugger, and so on) that compiles Kotlin code into native binaries that can be run without a VM. It can be used to compile code for embedded devices, the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) or iOS, macOS, and other Apple targets.

We can immediately draw some comparisons here with Flutter, which uses the Android NDK and LLVM to compile Dart on Android and iOS, respectively; this is known to be one of the key factors of Flutter's pretty good performance compared to React Native.

One of Kotlin/Native's powers comes from the fact that it can provide complete two-way interoperability with the Native targets. This means that you can use the C, Swift, and Objective-C frameworks...