``` Three. Pretend that Kotlin binaries are Java s...
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Three. Pretend that Kotlin binaries are Java sources. Normally, the Kotlin compiler runs first and the Java compiler sees the Kotlin code as binary .class files. Of course, all code elements, both source and binary, are represented uniformly inside the Java compiler. So instead of getting only annotated Java sources, the processor may also get annotated Kotlin binaries, it won’t notice the difference through the available API. Unfortunately, Javac won’t do that automatically, but we can plug in between the Java compiler and the annotation processor, find the binary elements ourselves and add them to the source elements normally returned by javac. A huge advantage is that this solution is rather easy to implement (involves a little bytecode generation, but we are kind of used to it:) ). There are a few important limitations, though: Kotlin code can not refer to the declarations generated by the processor and source-retained annotations are not visible through binaries.