Kotlin Native Compiler Under the Hood
summary
Walks through the Kotlin compiler stack from PSI to IR to codegen, shows how the K2 analysis API emits symbols, how IR is visited and mutated by the Compose compiler plugin, and how Kotlin/Native runs a phase engine to produce kexe binaries via Kotlin bindings to LLVM and dumped LLVM bitcode. Demonstrates the new Kotlin Swift export (beta) pipeline that maps IR to SIR then to Swift (not all features supported), shows performance timing per phase, and points to test data and a live code walkthrough for reproduction.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Kotlin Native compiler intro
- 1:07Repository and entry points
- 5:45Compiler architecture and K2 API
- 10:01Phase engine in Kotlin Native
- 12:06Kotlin to macOS executable
- 16:38Complex codebases like Kotlin
- 20:28LLVM bindings and IR conversion
- 23:01Performance metrics
- 23:43Kotlin to Swift export
- 27:26Swift Intermediate Representation
- 28:28Exploring with test data
- 29:12Q&A
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