Kotlin-native: Will Manual Memory Management be Supported Soon?

[willisjtc]

In the 2017 article about Kotlin Native: https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2017/04/kotlinnative-tech-preview-kotlin-without-a-vm/ manual memory management was mentioned:

Some platforms may only need manual memory management, and get an even smaller Kotlin/Native runtime in return.

Will manual memory management still be supported? If so, when can we look forward to this?

[artdfel]

Hello, @willisjtc! I looked through this article and, unfortunately, it seems like a bit obsolete. In its current state, Kotlin/Native uses automatic memory management. One manages memory manually only when working with C libraries, accessible via generated Kotlin bindings, see C Interop.
Can you tell what is your use-case here?

[willisjtc]

I was reading this article from Discord and was thinking about how nice having manual memory management would be for certain situations: gaming, systems, hyper critical performance apps that require no gc pauses...

https://blog.discordapp.com/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to-rust-a190bbca2b1f

[charlag]

@willisjtc it seems like it's not what Kotlin is aimed at, it's app level language (like Swift) and you are looking for something like Rust/C++

[willisjtc]

but let's be real, who wouldn't rather use Kotlin than rust/c++?

[willisjtc]

@charlag in swift, you actually do have the ability to do manual memory management.

Having manual memory management with kotlin native would give it a competitive edge, imho

[ESchouten]

Somewhat relevant: https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2020/07/kotlin-native-memory-management-roadmap/

[SvyatoslavScherbina]

Will manual memory management still be supported? If so, when can we look forward to this?

Manual memory management for C structures and arrays is available.
We don't plan to support manual memory management for Kotlin objects anytime soon, and don't have ETA for this.
Closing this issue as answered.