when JetBrains was building the new IR for Kotlin ...

# announcements

[Brian Dilley]

when JetBrains was building the new IR for Kotlin 1.4 - did they consider LLVM? I don’t know a bunch about this sorta thing so I could be asking a dumb question… just curious.

[serebit]

Considering Kotlin/Native actually uses LLVM IR, I'd say they most likely did consider it! 😛

[Dominaezzz]

The new IR is LLVM agnostic, it more or less represents pure Kotlin.
Kotlin/Native was built with the new IR infrastructure from the ground up, so yes.

[Brian Dilley]

cool

[Brian Dilley]

so then Kotlin Native is Kotlin -> Kotlin IR -> LLVM IR -> Native code? And basically anything that LLVM can target can be targeted with Kotlin?

[Dominaezzz]

Pretty much. (Assuming the runtime can fit on the target)

[Markus Böck]

LLVM IR is probably much much much lower than the IR they built

[Dominaezzz]

Coming from someone who has played with LLVM IR. It's not that much lower. It's just a bit lower.

[Markus Böck]

I have no clue about Kotlin IR but LLVM IR is basically like assembly with explicit stack allocation and inifite registers