After last month’s adventures into SwiftUI with my little weather app, I thought it would be interesting to recreate the same project, but in Android’s upcoming version of a declarative UI framework, Jetpack Compose. I’m curious how it compares to SwiftUI and what the Android development experience is like in 2021.
I’ve been developing on Apple’s platforms in some form since the early aughts. With the iPhone SDK in 2008 I took it from a side curiosity to my main career.
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At Highrise we’ve been building the future of our platform in a way that supports Android. We’ve put together a stack that is pretty challenging but really fun to build. It’s based on a C++ core and platform specific projects in Swift (for iOS) and Kotlin (for Android) that uses that core. On Swift you need to have an Objective-C++ wrapper for Swift to call functionality in the C++ core, but it’s pretty straightforward and things like wrapping a block in an std::function works pretty well. Android however runs on the JVM and requires using JNI to communicate with C++. This took away the niceness of Kotlin lambdas for asynchronous completion away from us. Or did it?
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