Platform libraries

To provide access to user's native operating system services, Kotlin/Native distribution includes a set of prebuilt libraries specific to each target. We call them Platform Libraries.

POSIX bindings

For all Unix- or Windows-based targets (including Android and iOS targets) we provide the POSIX platform lib. It contains bindings to platform's implementation of the POSIX standard.

To use the library, just import it:

import platform.posix.*

The only target for which it is not available is WebAssembly.

Note that the content of platform.posix is NOT identical on different platforms, in the same way as different POSIX implementations are a little different.

Popular native libraries

There are many more platform libraries available for host and cross-compilation targets. Kotlin/Native distribution provides access to OpenGL, zlib and other popular native libraries on applicable platforms.

On Apple platforms, objc library is provided for interoperability with Objective-C.

Inspect the contents of dist/klib/platform/$target of the distribution for the details.

Availability by default

The packages from platform libraries are available by default. No special link flags need to be specified to use them. Kotlin/Native compiler automatically detects which of the platform libraries have been accessed and automatically links the needed libraries.

On the other hand, the platform libs in the distribution are merely just wrappers and bindings to the native libraries. That means the native libraries themselves (.so, .a, .dylib, .dll etc) should be installed on the machine.

Last modified: 30 March 2023