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
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.
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.