[flax]

Could you explain why? I have been interested, in theory, in Kotlin Multiplatform. But I'm already very comfortable in Dart and Flutter. I have decades of experience with Java, Javascript, and quite a few years with Typescript. Kotlin feels like a different kind of language, one I find grating. I think this is primarily aesthetic, but it's still enough to make getting over the initial hump annoying. As petty as it is, I think the lack of statement-terminating semicolons is a major reason I do not like it. I would welcome a factual list of things that make the KM experience better for you.

[vips7L]

Kotlin doesn’t feel right to me either. I did a portion of AoC in it this year and it was surprisingly more verbose than I expected. I think the thing I liked the least was trailing lambda syntax combined with how verbose it was to define variables with types.

It also inherits all of the bad parts of the JVM. Crappy build tooling (gradle), and then the slow startup and high memory usage.

[cosmic_cheese]

Coming from writing a ton of Swift (and previously Obj-C), Kotlin’s ergonomics feel kinda off. It also feels like it’s different for the sake of being different more often than I’d like.

[satvikpendem]

I used Kotlin as well and it just feels off too. The package support is a major thing, as I don't want to mess around in Gradle, I want something that Just Works™. Dart 3 has much of the same feature set as Kotlin now with sealed class support, it's just not as functional, but it recently got tearoffs so you don't have to specify the class, just the property, similar to Swift (ie if you have an `enum Color { red, blue }` and a function takes `Color`, you can just do `f(.red)` not `f(Color.red)`).

The main thing though is that Dart has pub.dev and a CLI that makes it extremely easy to add packages, via `dart pub add`. If I do want to go more of a functional route I'll just use Rust instead, it has all of what Kotlin has and more, plus a similar streamlined package management as Dart in the form of `cargo add`.

[BoorishBears]

Funny you say that since Dart is the primary reason most people I know don't want to use Flutter.

There's been a trend of improved DX for languages used in app development:

ObjC -> Swift

Java -> Kotlin

Javascript -> Typescript

...Dart feels like the before with no after, even though it got traction in the era of the Afters.

[vips7L]

Darts pretty good. It has a lot of modern features, nullable types, pattern matching, sum types, and factory constructors; some really good build tooling. It can compile fully AoT.

[websiteapi]

isn't this just because Dart is way newer than those? it's from the 2010s. it's really modern in comparison (same generation as Kotlin swift and typescript)

[mdhb]

Dart is hands down the best modern language out there for app development right now what are you even talking about? I understand that maybe a lot of people haven’t used it or maybe haven’t used it in years and that probably drives a lot of the FUD but for those who use it, it has stupidly high ratings from developers who use it and has for years.

[wiseowise]

Have you even used modern Dart?