Not hands on but I've been paying attention. IMHO several things world mentioning:
- Compose desktop is for now dependent on the JVM. That is despite Kotlin now having a stable native compiler. Reason for this is that the library eco system is still lagging. That being said, you can build some nice things with it pretty quickly.
- IOS support is not stable yet. It kind of works but you'd be an early adopter.
- On web, there are two compose variants. Compose HTML is a bit of side show but uses a traditional DOM based approach. Compose web exists in wasm and js variants and renders its own components in a canvas either way. Compose web mainly makes sense for people wishing to target the web with their mobile Android/IOS code base.
- Google just announced a recommended status for KMP on mobile at Google IO. So, this is significant in light of the recent layoff rounds affecting e.g. the Flutter and Dart teams.
If you feel adventurous it's worth checking out now but you probably have to wait something like a year plus for this to stabilize on IOS. I'm personally curious to see how the whole wasm/web part evolves. The wasm compiler is currently alpha. My prediction is that compose multi-platform will stabilize over 2025 and will start going mainstream the year after. At that point it could become a serious alternative to flutter and react-native.
> That is despite Kotlin now having a stable native compiler.
K/N for desktop platforms exists basically in name only. The runtime is too slow, the ecosystem simply doesn't exist, and you have to go through the C interop layer (which was marked entirely unstable in a point release, breaking everything!!!!) to do things such as I/O which lacks any sort of resource management (making it trivial to e.g. leak sockets everywhere).
This could get better over time. Most of the native community seems focused on mobile. But if this is ever addressed, Kotlin could emerge as an alternative to things like Go and other statically compiled languages. It's early days for native. There are similar challenges with wasm support; particularly the wasmWasi target.
I also think that in the longer term Google's embrace of KMP does not bode well for Dart and Flutter, especially in light of recent cost-cutting measures.
But for now Flutter seems like a much more mature stack, at least on desktop.
That is a fork, or rather, extension to Jetpack Compose, Google's declarative UI framework for Android. It uses Skia for rendering but has an the identical API to Jetpack Compose, hence from the point of view of a framework user, there is nothing new about it (other than that it works on Android, iOS, desktop OSs and web).
It's inspired by React, but way more purist about it. So there's no CSS or equivalent, it's all done using contexts, there's no HTML, it's all React-style function components the whole way down.
There are some advantages to doing things that way, but I found there were also disadvantages. How much you like it will depend on how much you like ReactJS.
Does anyone have hands-on experience?