One Off the Slack: My Kingdom For a Stable IDE!
Early adopters of Compose are starting to chafe at needing to use Canary releases of Android Studio. Considering that Canary releases might not run without manual intervention, this is not surprising.
Dominic Fisher asked:
Does compose work in stable Android Studio yet? Since it doesn’t need the custom Kotlin compiler build anymore.
The biggest limitation is with setting up the Compose compiler plugin, as Google’s Adam Powell notes:
not without some custom gradle configuration to enable the compiler plugin, since the higher level android gradle plugin options that do it for you are only present in the alpha agp builds
Zach Klippenstein wondered:
Is compose support going to start migrating up to beta, etc with 4.2?
The answer from Google’s Romain Guy unfortunately boils down to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯:
Android Studio and Compose are not synced up for versioning
My interpretation: the Compose team cannot tell the Studio team what it must support. The fact that Compose can work with stock Kotlin builds probably helps and increases the likelihood that 4.2 will continue with Compose support when it progresses from Canary to Beta status. However, there are no guarantees, and the Studio team can do what it wants. We may need to stick to Canary builds for a while longer, as we have since the outset.
Alex Burdusel wants to use a different IDE altogether:
Any guidelines for the gradle configuration for making it work in the stable version? I’m more interested in making it work in Intellij than in AS
The upshot, once again, amounted to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
All of this will get sorted out in the fullness of time. The key features
are @Preview support and better auto-complete (e.g., to help recommend property
delegates). Eventually, the Studio team will ship a stable version that has those.
The question then becomes: what portion of that will get migrated to the Android
plugin for IntelliJ IDEA? Other IDEs, like Eclipse or Visual Studio Code, would have their own timetables
for supporting things like @Preview.
Read the original thread in the kotlinlang Slack workspace. Not a member? Join that Slack workspace here!