Kotlin Blueprints

Memory management

Kotlin Native is designed potentially to enable different memory management solutions for different target platforms. That's because it doesn't ship with a VM, and machine code is not always faster than JVM-based bytecode, as JVM does some optimizations to the code on the fly.

For example, in the future, it may make sense to have a tracing GC for server/desktop platforms, while ARC makes a lot more sense on iOS. Some platforms may only need manual memory management and may get an even smaller Kotlin Native runtime in return.

The latest preview features automatic reference counting with a cycle collector on top, but what the final memory management solution(s) will look like is unknown at this point.