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-libsmay be needed - on recent Ubuntu
apt install libncurses5is 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.