News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Kotlin M7. Parent comment

Re:Kotlin M7 by pjmlp on Thursday March 20, 2014 @11:46AM (#7436246)
A good alternative for Java on Android given Google's fork and not so good support for Scala and Clojure on Dalvik/ART?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Kotlin M7 by lmm on Thursday March 20, 2014 @12:14PM (#7436451)
Oh, I just wrote my (one, rather simple) android app in Scala. Are there problems with it?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Kotlin M7 by pjmlp on Thursday March 20, 2014 @01:19PM (#7437034)
Executables are slower and bigger than Java even with ProGuard, specially given how outdated Dalvik GC/JIT are.

Maybe this will improve with ART.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Kotlin M7 by pkuki on Thursday March 20, 2014 @04:10PM (#7438313)
Maybe they are slower to some extend, but for most cases it won't matter too much. I wrote simple game in scala and it was easy to constantly get 55-60 fps on newer devices: https://github.com/pkukielka/stronghold-defense

That being said I agree that jars are bigger and scala generates much more anonymous classes. Even with ProGuard that could be a problem on Android 2.3 or older. And ProGuard is a bit slow (for my game it was taking 30+ seconds for every build). Also Typesafe doesn't have plans for making scala first class citizen of Android.

So while Android development with scala is certainly possible there are few inconveniences which one should be aware of.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Kotlin M7 by pjmlp on Thursday March 20, 2014 @04:32PM (#7438502)
Nice game!
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Kotlin M7 by thescrewdriver on Thursday March 20, 2014 @12:43PM (#7436734)
It tends to generate lots of anonymous classes, which can make your jar bigger.
[ Parent | on HN ]