How does Kotest manage to declare tests on Kotlin/Native? I don't really understand how the codebase is structured

I don't understand the question, can you ask it in a different way

To my knowledge, the only way supported by the Kotlin team to declare tests on Native is through the

@Test

annotation. Since Kotest is able to declare tests in loops/conditions, then it can't be doing it like that. So how does it work?

Ah I see. Basically uses a compiler plugin, like how kotlin team do it

How difficult are these types of compiler plugins to write?

I'd say this goes against the grain of the whole Kotest architecture. Specs are discovered (on Js and Native: via a compiler plugin). Then each spec's "body" is executed, with test functions registering their test lambdas. To use the above extension function with a spec, you'd have to sort of wrap it into a lambda and register that within the spec's "body".

Yes? How does that change anything, other than “less boilerplate”?

What do you mean by "less boilerplate"? And given the static declaration above, which individual spec (an object!) would you register it with?

I did once play about with putting tests inside kotlin scripts - .kts files. And it worked. You could do

val mytest = funSpec {
  // test here
}

And it worked. Each test being a value. But until jetbrains make compiler plugins and kotlin scripts stable, things are changing too rapidly to build on this for a public release.