Kotlin/Native

Kotlin/Native is an LLVM backend for the Kotlin compiler, runtime implementation, and native code generation facility using the LLVM toolchain.

Kotlin/Native is primarily designed to allow compilation for platforms where virtual machines are not desirable or possible (such as iOS or embedded targets), or where a developer is willing to produce a reasonably-sized self-contained program without the need to ship an additional execution runtime.

Prerequisites:

• install JDK for your platform, instead of JRE. The build requires tools.jar, which is not included in JRE;
• on macOS install Xcode 11 (Xcode 12.0 is required to compile Kotlin/Native from sources)
• on Fedora 26+ yum install ncurses-compat-libs may be needed
• on recent Ubuntu apt install libncurses5 is needed

To compile from sources use following steps:

First, download dependencies:

./gradlew dependencies:update

Then, build the compiler and libraries:

./gradlew bundle

To build with experimental targets support compile with -Porg.jetbrains.kotlin.native.experimentalTargets.

The build can take about an hour on a Macbook Pro. To run a shorter build with only the host compiler and libraries, run:

./gradlew dist distPlatformLibs

To include Kotlin compiler in composite build and build against it, use the kotlinProjectPath project property:

./gradlew dist -PkotlinProjectPath=path/to/kotlin/project

It's possible to include in a composite build both Kotlin compiler and Kotlin/Native Shared simultaneously.

After that, you should be able to compile your programs like this:

export PATH=./dist/bin:$PATH
kotlinc hello.kt -o hello

For an optimized compilation, use -opt:

kotlinc hello.kt -o hello -opt

For tests, use:

./gradlew backend.native:tests:run

To generate interoperability stubs, create a library definition file (refer to samples/tetris/.../sdl.def), and run the cinterop tool like this:

cinterop -def lib.def

See the provided samples and INTEROP.md for more details.

The Interop tool generates a library in the .klib library format. See LIBRARIES.md for more details on this file format.