Hope to bring Kotlin to the Elements family

[mh (marc hoffman)]

@marcvanbreemen

Although Apple retired it, and not many will agree with me, it’s still a great language.

I agree, and our idea was to take the best parts of it, and improve some of the shortcomings…

@marcvanbreemen

Nitrogene is a nice name. Would be stupid to not pick that project up again …

Yeah, don’t think this one will happen…

[JohnMoshakis]

@mh

I agree, and our idea was to take the best parts of it, and improve some of the shortcomings…

Oxygene is that for me. I struggled with ios development until Oxygene.

[mh (marc hoffman)]

@JohnMoshakis

Oxygene is that for me. I struggled with ios development until Oxygene.

[chikega (Gary Chike)]

@mh Would ‘pure’ Objective-C be one of the languages that one could employ for unmanaged code in the Island platform? Just curious since I don’t do a lot of low-level coding.

[mh (marc hoffman)]

@chikega

@mh Would ‘pure’ Objective-C be one of the languages that one could employ for unmanaged code in the Island platform? Just curious since I don’t do a lot of low-level coding.

right now it’s not a language the compiler understands at all, no. But any of the existing 6 languages work well for low-level code, and TBH, as much as I liked Objective-C in the day, I’m not sure I’d see any reason to use it over C# (if you prefer curlies) or Oxygene (if you don’t) for an Elements project, if it were available.

The language itself feels a bit verbose and dated at this stage, and almost anything that made it great really came from the ObjC runtime (which you still get, on macOS/iOS, even with the other languages, including our Swift).

[chikega (Gary Chike)]

So it’s been more than two years since this thread was started. Any more news on languages 7 and 8? Just curious.

[mh (marc hoffman)]

Nothing concrete to announce at this stage, for Kotlin or in general.

[chikega (Gary Chike)]

No worries, Marc! I believe you all have a nice suite of languages for almost every taste

[xiaoguang]

I think target Harmony OS Next is something worth look at.

It’s a non android based OS developed by Huawei, and planned to business launch at Q3 this year. It does not compatible with the APK app, instead, we will need to use Huawei’s version typescipt, called ArkTS to develop its app.

For this new platform, it’s very difficult to share codes with other platforms.

Not sure if Element could do something on it.

[mh (marc hoffman)]

@xiaoguang

instead, we will need to use Huawei’s version typescipt, called ArkTS to develop its app.

If it’s based on TypeScript (and, I assume JavaScript?), does it support WebAssemly?

[xiaoguang]

ArkTS is an extension of typescript, and typescript is an extension of javascript, so yes, it support javascript.

For webassemly, no, it does not support. But it supports Native SDK JNI to call function like in C++ codes.

[mh (marc hoffman)]

@xiaoguang

ArkTS is an extension of typescript, and typescript is an extension of javascript, so yes, it support javascript.

For webassemly, no, it does not support. But it supports Native SDK JNI to call function like in C++ codes.

Ah ok.

I’m gonna be honest: I can’t see native Harmony OS being a priority for us any time soon, given its a rather niche OS, and using an underlying platform that is very different and orthogonal to all the ones we currently support. it would probably be a tremendous amount of work, for very little demand/return.

sorry,
marc