Kotlin Multiplatform Conversion

[jgillich]

I'm planning to port my navigation app to iOS using Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP). Unfortunately, KMP for iOS uses Kotlin/Native, which is incompatible with Java bytecode.

After searching for solutions and coming up empty, my plan is to convert brouter to Kotlin. The j2k tool in IntelliJ should be able to handle most of the conversion, but some parts will need to be done manually. Kotlin is fundamentally interoperable with Java, so anyone using brouter as a library should be able to continue doing so (if there are any besides myself).

In addition to the conversion, I'd like to refactor some of the code for better ergonomics and explore speeding up route generation with parallelism (might be futile 😄 ).

I realize this is a massive change, and I'm not asking for it to be accepted into brouter, not right now. At first, I'll be running it as a fork. This is just an an FYI - feel free to share any comments or thoughts below.

[devemux86]

Changing the language of any project will make the maintainers' work more difficult.

And it will make many developers unable to make new code contributions in Java.

So this is something that should not be done lightly.

[afischerdev]

@jgillich
Thank you for letting us know about your intentions.
There are no plans to switch to another programming language. But it's always good to know what's happening outside of this universe.