Russell Wolf

By now you’ve surely heard of Kotlin Multiplatform, and maybe tried it out in a demo. Maybe you’ve even integrated some shared code into a production app. If you have, you know that there are many subtle complications that come up when you want to ship shared Kotlin code. This includes things like modularization, translating between Kotlin and Swift, managing multiple repositories that depend on each other, and optimizing build times and binary sizes. It’s not as easy as it looks when you write your first “Hello World”!

At Touchlab, we’ve been involved with Kotlin Multiplatform since the very beginning, and we’ve learned a thing or two along the way about what does and doesn’t work well. Come hear about how we’ve solved some of these difficulties to ship Multiplatform code across all sorts of organizations and environments, so you’re ready to use KMP in the real world.

Software development is hard. It’s even harder when you’re building libraries that other developers will depend on. I’ll talk about my experience with library development in Kotlin Multiplatform, trying to highlight challenges I’ve faced and mistakes I’ve made. We’ll look at this through the lens of recent updates I’ve made to the library I maintain, as well as the current state of the wider Kotlin library ecosystem.

Multiplatform Kotlin facilitates code-sharing by making platform-agnostic portions of the standard library available in common code that is written once but can run on any target. As Multiplatform development really starts to take off over the next year, there must also be a robust ecosystem of third party libraries available to application developers.

I’ll talk through what it looks like to create such a library, with lessons from my experiences building one of the early libraries in the mobile Multiplatform space. We'll talk about how to find shared abstractions around different platform APIs, how to handle the fast-paced evolution of this environment, and what this all felt like as a first-time library developer. When we're done, you’ll be ready to leverage the growing ecosystem as well as make your own contributions.