The PlayN Kotlin port (aka Klay)

[Christoph Dietze]

Hi there,

I am the guilty party that took on the challenge to port PlayN to Kotlin.

Here is a summary of what it is and its status.

Klay is 1:1 port of PlayN.

Roughly speaking, I used IntelliJs Java -> Kotlin converter and fixed what was necessary.

And replaced all java.* references to make it suitable for KotlinJS.

All demos are working for the JVM backend.

However, that's all. This is the only backend yet.

klay.core and its required libraries (pythagoras.kt, react.kt) do compile to JS, but there is no backend implementation.

I hesitate to port PlayN's GWT backend, because it's still a lot of work

and I expect LLVM + WebAssembly will eventually be better suited to run a game in the browser.

Plus: The LLVM will be necessary anyways to support iOS.

But there is no support to compile Kotlin to WebAssembly yet.

You can find the main project here:

https://github.com/cdietze/klay

And the necessary libraries which I ported in the same manner: (You will need to build them yourself - there is no deployment to a central repo yet),

https://github.com/cdietze/pythagoras.kt

https://github.com/cdietze/react.kt

More things that are on the roadmap:

- Refactor Klay to make it more Kotlin-esque

- Port tripleplay

However, I am currently not actively working on it.

I am mostly interested in a browser-backend but that's on halt for the mentioned reasons.

Cheers,

Christoph

[Dieter]

Very interesting. Great work!