Since JS and Native (and presumably WASM) lower to...

# compiler

[jw]

Since JS and Native (and presumably WASM) lower to a completely different format at the very end, is there a hook in a compiler plugin where you can see and manipulate the IR of the entire transitive dependency graph rather than only that of the compilation unit?

[Filip Dolník]

Speaking only for the native target: Yes, but no reasonable one that I’m aware of - There is a “way” to manipulate the entire IR, but it’s not officially supported or straightforward. Basically, you would have to resort to some of the hacks we do with the SKIE plugin.

Suppose you only need to manipulate the IR and not generate any new exposed code (that would be callable from Swift). In that case, you can create a regular compiler plugin with the same extension listener you would use to manipulate the IR of a single module. But instead of adding it to the compilation phase, you add it to the linking phase (both the linker and the compiler phase use the same code, just with different settings).

The point is that linker still calls this IR extension but with a module that represents the whole project. However, there is one main problem with this approach: caching - you can’t modify any code cached in previous runs (you can, but these changes would be overridden in later phases). So, you would have to turn it off, which can increase compilation time significantly. It’s possible to get around this, but you would have to get dangerously close to “it’s better to fork the compiler territory” 😄

But it’s way more complicated if you need to add new exposed code (for example, functions callable from Swift). At that point, the only practical solution is to fork SKIE (or the compiler).

[jw]

I will try that. Thanks! I'm not generating anything new, just manipulating the contents of function body statements.

[Filip Dolník]

Yeah, in that case it should be doable if you are ok with loosing the caching support. Btw it might still make sense to start from a fork of SKIE as it solves a lot of the initial configuration.

[jw]

I'm (finally) getting around to trying this with Kotlin/JS, and I do not see anything that I register being invoked (although the plugin itself is). Has anything changed for your usage on native since K2?

I made a new thread about it but no answers https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/C7L3JB43G/p1739217898811039