[Soot-list] Kotlin as future programming language for Soot?

[Patrick Lam]

It's good that Kotlin does interoperate with other JVM languages. I 
guess my question is what the benefits of using Kotlin would be. 
Certainly there is the drawback that Laurie pointed out of having 
another technology. I do think that a lot of Soot doesn't need to be 
modified by most users, so it's also a question of which parts would be 
in Kotlin.

Looks like Kotlin was designed to compile faster than Scala. Ondrej is 
probably the person who has worked most with Scala around here. I'd be 
interested in his thoughts.

pat

On 2018-10-24 8:53 a.m., Laurie Hendren wrote:
> Hi Eric,
> 
> I am a little nervous about including another technology that future 
> users must master in order to use and improve Soot.   If you were to 
> change/add technologies,  then hopefully it would be only for some 
> components where the Soot user would not have to modify the code.
> 
> Laurie
> 
> +--------------------------------------------------------------
> | Laurie Hendren --- http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/~hendren
> | Professor, School of Computer Science, McGill University
> | Canada Research Chair in Compiler Tools and Techniques, FRSC
> | http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/mclab  https://opalmedapps.com
> +--------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> On 2018-10-24 7:26 AM, Eric Bodden wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> we have internally been discussing the possibility to use Kotlin as a 
>> development language at least for some parts of future (major) 
>> releases of Soot. In this issue we would like to get feedback from the 
>> community about whether or not this change would be desired. We find 
>> it hard to decide and would really like to ask you, the community, 
>> about your preferences on this point. It would be great if you could 
>> take a few minutes to comment here:
>> https://github.com/Sable/soot/issues/1050
>>
>> Best wishes
>> Eric
>