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.
For all Unix or Windows based targets (including Android and
iPhone) we provide the posix platform lib. It contains bindings
to platform's implementation of POSIX standard.
To use the library just
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.
There are many more platform libraries available for host and
cross-compilation targets. Kotlin/Native distribution provides access to
OpenGL, SDL, 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.
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.
Kotlin/Native installation provides a wide spectrum of examples
demonstrating the use of platform libraries.
See samples for details.