MPP Thoughts

[gdude2002]

Having chatted with @DRSchlaubi a bit about MPP, I figured I should chat about what needs doing for KordEx MPP, outside of waiting for Kord.

There aren't tons of things, surprisingly:

• Restructure the project for MPP development
• Write a new MPP library that wraps ICU for all platforms
• Switch to ICU Locale objects
• Abstract and rewrite all filesystem and resource code
• Make plug-ins a JVM-only concept for now
• Replace anything from Apache Commons and other core JVM-only libs

This won't happen for quite some time, but it's definitely worth thinking about.

[russellbanks]

Kord got JavaScript support in 0.9.0 and Kotlin Native support doesn't look far away - https://github.com/kordlib/kord/issues/69#issuecomment-1496680274

[DRSchlaubi]

Kord got JavaScript support in 0.9.0 and Kotlin Native support doesn't look far away - kordlib/kord#69 (comment)

Kord always was the least important blocker. Currently biggest blocker is probably icu

[gdude2002]

For those keeping an eye on this issue over a year later - porting ICU4J to a Kotlin MPP project for all platforms is the major blocker at the moment. I think we can probably rewrite or find alternatives for most Java-based libraries otherwise, but an ICU4J port would be massive, will require accessing a ton of resources, and will need to be kept closely in-line with official releases.

It's a lot of work, and I don't see me managing to actually find the spoons for it - so I'm marking this issue as Help Wanted.

[DRSchlaubi]

Maybe a list of features of ICU4J that are actually used by kordex would be helpful

[gdude2002]

We've talked about this already - ICU4J is an exposed API for KordEx, and we don't know what consumers will need.

[DRSchlaubi]

We've talked about this already - ICU4J is an exposed API for KordEx, and we don't know what consumers will need.

That doesn't matter, if we typealias to ICU4j on JVM, then users can still use all the features of ICU4J on JVM projects and people running Kord on JS/Native likely will have simpler bots anyw, so blocking the progress just for feature

[gdude2002]

ICU doesn't even exist on JS, there is a native ICU4C tho at least, which helps for native, but if we have to do porting anyway..

[DRSchlaubi]

ICU doesn't even exist on JS, there is a native ICU4C tho at least, which helps for native, but if we have to do porting anyway..

There is no way that JS doesn't have ICU

[gdude2002]

Looks like there's no external library for it, whether you can use it depends on how your Node interpereter was compiled

[DRSchlaubi]

Going back to the question which parts of ICU kordex actually uses, since kordex doesn't exist on js/native yet, I would not consider it as part of the API as the API doesn't exist yet

[gdude2002]

We're using a few parts of it internally

• Measure
• MeasureFormat
• MeasureUnit
• MessageFormat
• ULocale

This already requires a good chunk of ICU's resource files

[DRSchlaubi]

We're using a few parts of it internally

• Measure
• MeasureFormat
• MeasureUnit
• MessageFormat
• ULocale

Those should not be too hard to replace, I will try and see how doable this is without changing the JVM API surface and will let you know