Kart is a work-in-progress Kotlin to Dart compiler, aiming to support all platforms Dart runs on.
- Compile Kotlin: To get started, let's compile Kotlin code that doesn't have dependencies. We should support all statements and expressions, methods, classes and interfaces, etc. We'll support a tiny subset of Kotlin's standard library as compiler intrinsics.
- Write a standard lib: Write a Kotlin stdlib implementation targeting Dart.
- Further tooling support: Write a gradle plugin, look at Kotlin and Dart interop, incremental compilation and hot reload, ...
To start hacking on kart, clone this repository and download the Kotlin CLI compiler
somewhere. Next, create a file called local.properties and put the following content into it:
kart.stdlib_jar=/path/to/downloaded/kotlinc/lib/kotlin-stdlib.jarFinally, run pub get in the kart_support directory.
You can now compile a set of test cases with ./gradlew integration_tests:generateTextDescription.
Create a folder called example in this directory, then run Main.kt in kotlin2kernel, passing
the stdlib location from the setup step as parameter. This will compile all Kotlin sources in
example into output.dill, which can then be run in Dart.
For some input files that work, see integration_tests/cases/.
The generated Kernel files can be run similar to regular Dart files:
Just use dart --null-safety output.dill
To further compile a Kernel file to JavaScript with dart2js, a matching Dart platform needs to
be linked. To do that, run dart kart_support/tool/link_stdlib.dart <output.dill> js. If you want to
run the generated file in node, use js-server instead of js in the end.
Finally, run dart2js <output_linked.dill>.
To view a generated .dill file in text form, you can run
dart kart_support/tool/kernel_to_text.dart < file.dill.
For now, the project consists of two main modules:
kernel is used to read, write and transform .dill files in Kotlin.
kotlin2kernel is the main compiler, which transforms Kotlin IR to Kernel components.