This is a sample of creating a JVMTI agent with Kotlin Native. As an example, it displays all the known system property names on agent load. At this time I have only built and tested it on Windows.

In order to build, the latest gradle and JDK >= 8 has to be installed. Then from the cloned directory, run:

path/to/gradle --no-daemon build

This will build a DLL at build/konan/bin/{target}/sampleagent.{ext} where {target} is the platform (e.g. mingw) and {ext} is the shared lib extension (e.g. .dll).

Now this can be passed as the agent on and java command. For example, in a directory with HelloWorld.class that simply prints out Hello, World!, the agent can be used like so:

java -agentpath:path/to/sampleagent.dll HelloWorld

When run on Windows for me, this is the output::

Displaying 16 property names:
java.vm.specification.name
java.vm.version
java.vm.name
java.vm.info
java.ext.dirs
java.endorsed.dirs
sun.boot.library.path
java.library.path
java.home
java.class.path
sun.boot.class.path
java.vm.specification.vendor
java.vm.specification.version
java.vm.vendor
sun.java.command
sun.java.launcher
Hello, World!

That's basically it for this PoC. I might add a linux version at some point.

What Did We Learn?

Notes (only valid as of the time this was written):

• Kotlin Native is a pain to use with IDEA and it's unfortunate that they are going w/ CLion
• There is no good way to pass C-instantiated objects into Kotlin
  • But you can pass Longs and work with them like pointers which is nice
• There is no good way to export top-level symbols from Kotlin Native
  • But a C/C++ shim is doable
• There is no easy way to add your own C/C++ files to the build
  • I had to add the C++ file and then export all symbols so it would not override exports from existing Kotlin files
• The concept of nullable native pointers really meshes well with Kotlin's null checks
• All of the interop names and aliases can become confusing because of similar names
  • E.g. CPointer vs CPointed vs CPointerVar vs CPointerVarOf
  • Someone needs to write the Kotlinomicon like they did for Rust
• In gradle, linkerOpts actually goes to clang++, so I had to add -Xlinker
• In gradle, spaces in Windows' paths are not handled properly in linkerOpts and you have to manually quote them
• Overall, Kotlin Native has a very bright future. Once you are out of the FFI world, things should be smooth.