I presented this at Droidcon NYC on September 19, 2024.

Available as code, video, slides, Droidtube, & Speaker Deck.

Memory management on Android is easy: the garbage collector does almost everything and LeakCanary handles the rest! But Kotlin/Multiplatform brings new challenges. Your new features could be blocked if Kotlin/Native leaks memory.

In this talk you’ll get a refresher on Android's garbage collector, and you’ll learn how Swift works without one. Once that groundwork is laid you’ll see how Kotlin/Native integrates these two models.

We’ll cover some memory management tools & techniques:

Using Xcode to see what’s leaking
Avoiding leaks when mixing Kotlin and Swift
Using PhantomReference to test memory bugs
How Kotlin inline classes compare to Valhalla’s primitive classes.

If you’d like to improve memory management in a multiplatform app, this talk is for you.