<Elide>, the open source runtime, has released `1.0.0-beta6`. I've been excited to post this for a l...

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[Samuel Gammon]

Elide, the open source runtime, has released 1.0.0-beta6. I've been excited to post this for a long time; although Elide is written in Kotlin, it has never been able to run Kotlin for all of us who enjoy it. That is now a thing of the past. Kotlin is now supported K 🥳

🆕 Run Kotlin with no prior build step
🆕 Use Kotlin Serialization seamlessly
🆕 Use Kotlin Test out of the box
🆕 Gradle and Maven plugins!
✅ Install from NPM and Maven
✅ Build code, run tests, install dependencies, get coverage, all without Gradle and with no library setup
✅ Build/run Kotlin, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python in one runtime
✅ Call between languages with near-0 overhead
✅ Support for most of the Node API; targeting WinterTC
✅ Drop-in replacement for javac, kotlinc, jar
✅ elide:llm -- local LLM inference with any GGUF model from HuggingFace
✅ elide:sqlite -- use sqlite from your app easily

Elide's Gradle and Maven plugins are also now available:

https://github.com/elide-dev/gradle
https://github.com/elide-dev/maven

The plugins simply swap out javac for Elide, and optionally delegate dependency fetching. As a result, compilation is accelerated by up to 20x, and dependency fetching by up to 100x. This is a drop-in replacement with nothing to pay or license.

Try Elide on macOS arm64 or Linux amd64:

curl -sSL --tlsv1.2 elide.sh | bash -s -

⭐ our repo if you like our work, and wish to see more Kotlin support 😄 See the thread here for gif samples or questions 👇 🧵

[Samuel Gammon]

👇 this release
https://github.com/elide-dev/elide/releases/1.0.0-beta6

[Samuel Gammon]

👇 benchmarking javac

[Samuel Gammon]

👇 benchmarking kotlinc

[Samuel Gammon]

👇 Gradle plugin, now available at id("dev.elide")
https://github.com/elide-dev/gradle

[Norbert Kiesel]

I installed 1.0.0-beta6 and elide --version prints that, but elide init fails with

elide Uncaught fatal exception: com.oracle.svm.core.jdk.UnsupportedFeatureError: Resource bundle lookup must be loaded during native image generation: class sun.util.logging.resources.logging

This is on Linux-6.12.32-amd64 and using export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-21-openjdk-amd64.
Similar issue when trying to run elide run a.kt with a.kt being

fun main() {
  println("Hello, Elide!")
}

shows

elide Uncaught fatal exception: kotlin.NotImplementedError: An operation is not implemented: Not yet implemented: KotlinJarBundleInfo

[Samuel Gammon]

try elide run a.kts and just use the println?

[Samuel Gammon]

thank you for reporting this, let me take a look

[Samuel Gammon]

also, does elide init immediately fail? or after some questions? that's interesting

[Samuel Gammon]

(easy to fix, but i'm surprised it hasn't surfaced before...)

[Samuel Gammon]

(also, filed here to track)

[Norbert Kiesel]

elide run a.kts works. Also works when using

fun main() {
  println("Hello, Elide!")
}
main()

And yes, elide init immediately fails. Of course, error message is much more than the single line.

[Samuel Gammon]

i can post a test version with a fix for the first issue; the second issue is probably a mismatch in behavior with .kt, which is also fixable 🙂

[Samuel Gammon]

thank you, this is excellent feedback, ill post a test binary, once fixed, on that issue, and then it will make it into the next release

[Samuel Gammon]

also, what is your github, so i can credit you in the release notes? 😄

[Norbert Kiesel]

https://github.com/nkiesel

[Samuel Gammon]

followed as well!

[Fudge]

I have some questions:
1 . Are arbitrary compiler plugins supported e.g. Compose
2. Is kotlin execution interpreted, skipping the compilation step, or does it compile it to jvm bytecode first and run it on GraalVM normally? If the latter, I don't understand the function of the runtime over just using GraalVM

[Samuel Gammon]

1. Arbitrary plugins are not supported yet; only Serialization and PowerAssert (but the latter is not exposed to the user just yet)
a. We have plans to support all official Kotlin compiler plugins as builtins + KotlinX, perhaps some popular community ones
b. We have a longer term plan where we can support arbitrary plugins
2. Regarding Kotlin execution: Both routes are supported, in short
a. kts runs through scripting
i. this runs on Espresso
b. kt is built to bytecode and then executed as a JAR
i. when run through Elide, this is run on Espresso
ii. but you can also just build a JAR and execute it on any JVM
> I don't understand the function of [Elide over GraalVM]
Elide is built with GraalVM, and so it's essentially just preconfiguring everything here, making javac and kotlinc cooperate in a Native Image context, and so on, and adding the end-to-end pieces that make it a full toolchain, e.g.:

• Maven and NPM fetchers
• Test discovery and execution
• Coverage, linting... etc
Additionally, we use GraalJs for the JS side, and add support for TypeScript and the Node API, neither of which are supported in stock GVM. Of course there is GraalNode, but that delegates to Node's event loop; Elide is sort of "upside-down GraalNode," in that it is still JVM "leading the way" for the event loop, with Node API implemented on top of JDK.

[Samuel Gammon]

and, thank you for those questions 🙂 they are good ones. basically, Elide is to GraalVM as Node is to V8

[Fudge]

Espresso runs bytecode

[Fudge]

The important part is not compiling to bytecode

[Fudge]

Thanks for the response

[Samuel Gammon]

ah, sorry, yes, this is just compile-and-then-run; it is not a new Kotlin interpreter

[skominas.ainis]

Off-topic, but was it only you solo developing this project or more people? Insane if this was done only by one person!

[Samuel Gammon]

Thank you, that's so kind @skominas.ainis 🙂 most of Elide has been me so far. But I do have a friend who took on the server (@darvld on GitHub) and who is awesome. We're expanding to 10 so we should be able to ship much faster now. At least that's the hope! Elide has also had a lot of one-off contributions from various people, and many many people have helped with testing and debugging

[Samuel Gammon]

when people file bugs, we are overjoyed, and every time we list them in our release notes with a special thank-you section. i don't think it would have been possible to build without that feedback.

[skominas.ainis]

Great to hear about the expansion and again, astounding work!