Hypothetically speaking If the Kotlin Native team ...

# kotlin-native

[napperley]

Hypothetically speaking If the Kotlin Native team were doing third party Kotlin Native wrappers for the GObject libraries (GTK, Pango, Cairo etc) how would they do it (including handling complex C library dependencies)? GTK is well known for having complex C library dependencies, which are so complex that it isn't possible to statically link GTK itself.

[Dominaezzz]

Knowing them, they'll compile the header and leave linking to consumers.

[napperley]

Is there a example of this technique in action?

[napperley]

How would the consumer (a Kotlin Native library/program) do the linking when it isn't done at the Kotlin Native library level (on the producer side)?

[napperley]

With the KotlinX Coroutines library it handles the linking.

[Dominaezzz]

I've done this in kgl-glfw .

[Dominaezzz]

I compile the headers and provide a interface.

[Dominaezzz]

Then a consume can install the glfw locally, and simply specify it their link line and all the symbols will magically resolve.

[Dominaezzz]

Another interesting thing I've done is provide kgl-glfw-static , where it's an empty KLIB with a static library. Just by adding that dependency all the symbols are automatically resolved statically.

[Dominaezzz]

So my consumers can choose between static linking and dynamic linking.

[napperley]

Is the linking only applicable to a Kotlin Native program, or does it also apply to a Kotlin Native library (acting as a consumer)?

[Dominaezzz]

It only applies to a program. If a library consumes kgl-glfw they don't have to specify any linker stuff.

[Dominaezzz]

Although, unit tests count as a program, so it's debatable.

[napperley]

There are cases where a Kotlin Native library would need to depend on another Kotlin Native library (has dependencies on some C libraries) to access certain C libraries.

[Dominaezzz]

If it runs unit tests (the consumer library) it will have to specify in the link line for the test executables. Should be easy enough in a controlled environment

[napperley]

Would that mean only the linkerOpts property would need to be set in a def file on the consumer side?

[Dominaezzz]

It would be specified in gradle, but yeah pretty much.

[napperley]

Tried it the other day, and it works as expected simple smile . It should be established as best practice when developing a Kotlin Native library to NOT include any linking metadata.