Have Travelex considered submitting the benchmark results to the Kotlin Native team? I’m pretty sure the team would be eager to analyse the results since they are currently benchmarking Kotlin Native against Kotlin JVM, and have a interest in promoting Kotlin Native for server-side development.
Even though Kotlin Native hasn’t reached v1.0 yet it has attracted an enormous amount of interest from software developers. Kotlin Native has some very desirable performance characteristics that would make it suitable for Serverless:
- AOT compilation
- Self contained binaries
- ARC memory model with cyclic collector for Kotlin Native programs/libs
- Manual memory management for C interop
- Unique Worker concurrency model (https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2018/02/application-development-in-kotlinnative/) that is designed for parallelism/lock free concurrency
A basic overview of Kotlin Native can be found in this presentation.
Would be very prudent for Travelex to discuss the use of Kotlin Native for Serverless apps with the Kotlin Native team. Kotlin shouldn’t be ruled out for Serverless development since the performance of the language is heavily influenced by the platform it is running on, and Kotlin Native would likely perform better than Go (in theory) if a Serverless benchmark was done.
At the very least Travelex should keep a VERY close eye on Kotlin Native. Wouldn’t be surprising to see Kotlin Native supported by a major Serverless platform in the very near future. Most likely IBM’s Cloud Functions platform (based on Apache’s Open Whisk) would support Kotlin Native since it already supports Swift, which like Kotlin Native is LLVM based (shouldn’t be difficult for IBM to add the missing support, about 85 -90 % of it is done already — https://juan-medina.com/2017/07/30/kotlin-native-serverless/)
IBM Cloud Functions already supports Kotlin (on the JVM only). Currently IBM is developing a Kotlin runtime (experimental) that only covers the JVM side. However IBM’s time would be far better spent adding support for Kotlin Native, and developing a basic Serverless ecosystem (doesn’t need to be large) for Kotlin Native itself in collaboration with the Kotlin Native team and the Kotlin community.