IR also allows the creation of the common compiler plugin API. While reducing the complexity of the compiler infrastructure and splitting language-specific operations from platform-specific, Which are used to create platform specific builds. This new intermediate representation (also in a tree format) is designed to serve as a common representation for different compiler backends (JVM, JS or Native), Starting from version 1.4, Kotlin now has a new representation layer - a new Intermediate Representation (IR). It will be represented by the following PSI tree:

This is an obvious implementation of a syntax tree written in Java and containing familiar methods, such as: Put simply, in Kotlin, AST is a high-level interface used to work with nodes of the tree, whereas PSI is a more specific implementation.ĪST nodes are represented with the special interface ASTNode. PSI contains functionality capable of working not only with high-level syntactical features, but with particular language specifics. Kotlin Compiler builds a simple Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) from the code and enriches it to a special extended AST, called Program Structure Interface PSI. And the main thing that should be done by compiler to process the code is to build proper intermediate representation. Kotlin compiler requires several stages to parse and preprocess the code. In this post we will briefly describe different Internal Representations provided by Kotlin compiler. Learn how to install SDKMAN!.Types of Internal Representation of Kotlin code The bin directory contains the scripts needed to compile and run Kotlin on Windows, macOS, and Linux.Īn easier way to install Kotlin on UNIX-based systems, such as macOS, Linux, Cygwin, FreeBSD, and Solaris, is SDKMAN!. Unzip the standalone compiler into a directory and optionally add the bin directory to the system path. Install the compiler Manual installĭownload the latest version ( kotlin-compiler-1.8.20.zip) from GitHub Releases. Learn how to get started with Kotlin in an IDE. They provide full Kotlin support out of the box without needing additional components. A general way to write Kotlin applications is using an IDE - IntelliJ IDEA or Android Studio.

Installing the command-line compiler is not an essential step to use Kotlin. You can download the latest version manually or via a package manager. Every Kotlin release ships with a standalone version of the compiler.

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