Of course, there's a trade-off between Kotlin Native and Multi OS Engine. Kotlin Native is a lighter runtime. BUt with MOE, you can use arbitrary libraries that target the JVM (well, the JVM subset that works on Android). So MOE makes a lot more existing code available for iOS. For Kotlin Native to truly deliver on the promise of cross-platform business logic, a Kotlin library ecosystem independent of the JVM will need to develop.
This space is going to be interesting to watch over the next little while.
It's not a way to run a JVM language and certainly not a way to generate Kotlin code for native targets.
Kotlin Native is very exciting because it's a potential threat across the board: not just to run iOS apps written in Kotlin, but also to generate native code from Kotlin in back end system, a domain that's currently heavily contested by both Go and Rust, and also to write Kotlin and generate Web Assembly.
It's going to be a very interesting next lustrum.
Or someone writes a bridge between native Kotlin code and AOT'd JVM code. Or someone writes a kind of reverse compiler from JVM bytecode to Kotlin. Not sure how practical either is due to sheer JRE stdlib size.
This is really cool! Excited to dig into their repo: https://github.com/jetbrains/kotlinconf-app
In any case it's good that different projects are approaching this from different angles.
Any widget toolkit, on any platform ever, that has tried to provide it's own cross-platform widgets, has been completely terrible and ends up being native-nowhere instead of native-everywhere.
Only need the SDK tooling, without being forced to debug extra layers of third party tools.
Using extra, non official language X usually overshadows the extra debugging and configuration efforts of adding yet another layer into the overall architecture.
