So above I noticed a thread where they were talkin...

# webassembly

[gbaldeck]

So above I noticed a thread where they were talking about Kotlin IR... what does IR stand for? Instruction Register? And what is it's purpose?

[Svyatoslav Kuzmich [JB]]

Intermediate Representation of program inside the compiler

[sdeleuze]

I hope there will be a dedicated deep dive in Koltin IR talk at Kotlinconf 😉

[gbaldeck]

and what is the IR's purpose?

[gbaldeck]

nm, I found this great explanation here: http://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/ir/

[Svyatoslav Kuzmich [JB]]

Great article! In its classification Kotlin IR is structured and tree-based.

[Frédéric Camblor]

Is there a difference in meaning between IR and AST?

[Svyatoslav Kuzmich [JB]]

AST is a tree representation of a code in a programming language. IR often defines its own, intermediate language. IRs can take various forms, AST is one of them.

Kotlin IR is in the form of AST and it defines a new language. Kotlin IR is not a direct representation of source code:
• IR must have all of its types inferred.
• Kotlin has a some syntactic sugar that IR has not. It has to be desugared first.
• IR has some lower-level platform constructs (static functions, class fields, etc.) that Kotlin has not.

[Frédéric Camblor]

Thx for precision 👌

[sdeleuze]

Super interesting indeed, thanks @Frédéric Camblor for the question and thanks @Svyatoslav Kuzmich [JB] for the response 😉