Development of Kotlin / Native Intermediate Representation and Optimizations

Abstract

Kotlin is a statically typed programming language that supports object-oriented and functional programming. It sup-ports JVM, JS and native platforms via LLVM (Kotlin / Native). The first two targets are backed with well-developed virtual machines that can perform advanced program optimizations at runtime. However, for native platforms, all optimizations must be performed at compile time. Currently Kotlin / Native lacks many optimizations, which is why the performance of the generated code is poor in many cases. This paper describes a way to solve this problem by introducing an additional SSA-based intermediate representation and implementing escape analysis using it. Experimental results have shown that this approach can significantly improve performance.