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Comment by dathanb82

9 hours ago

Pretty sure it’s the other way around: Kotlin was implemented on the JVM and that’s its primary target, and got a native implementation later for folks that don’t want to run a JVM.

Is that relevant? Kotlin fully exists without the JVM, as requested.

  • Sort of? The kotlin standard library yes, but it’s pretty rare to write an app with only the standard library. It feels like you’re dismissing the Java interop as a secondary benefit, but for most uses of Kotlin it’s probably more important to project success than the language itself. So I think it’s accurate that without the JVM Kotlin would be essentially dead.

    • > dismissing the Java interop as a secondary benefit

      I mean, I don't really care about any of that. I was just responding to the (likely unserious) technical critique that there is no Kotlin VM. As for whether Kotlin as a language would be popular without the JVM, that's a different question.

      1 reply →

  • A subset of Kotlin has a native backend, not good enough to power JetBrains products, which still require Java Virtual Machine.

    It is so good, that JetBrains themselves rather use Rust or C++ for native code libraries on their IDEs, and not officially supported on the Android NDK.