Does kotlin native dll win have VM which contains kotlin GC

Question

Does kotlin native dll win have VM which contains kotlin GC inside Or it s just pure C without any GC or VM inside

Pablichjenkov · Answer

I read somewhere that the new memory model ships with a small runtime that does garbage collection

Pablichjenkov · Answer

to-elixir · Answer

I m confused C language doesn t have any run time and GC if the native DLL is pure C How can it have runtime inside it

Pablichjenkov · Answer

KN is not c is binary machine code generated by the kotlin compiler The fact that it is compliant with header files doesn t mean it is quite the same as c generated binaries probably similar tho The runtime is basically a library similar to the c standard lib glibc Where you got memory allocation utility functions and other utility functions Perhaps the term runtime is misleading in this case

to-elixir · Answer

The binary machine code generated by kotlin is same to generated by mingw gcc Or it s still different

to-elixir · Answer

for example one kotlin hello world program and generated by kotlin same hello world program by C and compiled by gcc or mingw Are the result same

Pablichjenkov · Answer

Humm that is a good question that I don t know how to answer But my intuition says that it won t be quite the same Is it possible that KN compiler reuses some gcc outputs in some operations After all gcc has been out for a while and is compatible with all hardware architecture abis But to see if it looks the same you will have to check it on your own

Pablichjenkov · Answer

Perhaps for a hello world the output looks similar because is a really small program with one standard library function call But as a program grows it will start deviating more and more The 2 languages these compilers parse are very different

ephemient · Answer

No VM yes GC

ephemient · Answer

C doesn t mean no GC as past projects like Boehm GC demonstrate

ephemient · Answer

But in any case Kotlin Native doesn t emit C it produces LLVM IR which is converted directly to machine code

ephemient · Answer

which makes use of the runtime that K N links into the binary output for things like GC and RTTI

ephemient · Answer

to-elixir · Answer

Kotlin native swift objective c are using LLVM as the backend compiler Is this the main reason that the mac ios build package of kotlin can be used directly by swift the class instance in kotlin can be used in swift without additional transformation

Pablichjenkov · Answer

The reason why it can be used directly is because it implements the Apple native protocols Is kinda similar to the jni in the java world These Applications are packaged in a way where they allow a host code to execute under the App process It doesn t care what compiled it it is basically a jump to the region in memory where the foreign code resides and then let it execute For your binary file to run it needs to conform to Apples protocol just that