On the Applicability of Annotation-Based Source Code Modification in Kotlin (Work...
summary
Compares four concrete approaches—KAPT (legacy), KSP, custom compiler plugins, and load‑time agents—and provides proof‑of‑concept implementations on GitHub: a compiler plugin that injects IR nodes into function bodies and a Java agent that rewrites bytecode. Finds KSP: code generation only, no expression‑level analysis, about twice as fast as KAPT and multiplatform; compiler plugin: IR‑level modification across targets but very complex and poorly documented; KAPT is slow/maintenance mode; agents work on JVM only and increase startup time.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Annotation-based code modification
- 2:09KSP for annotation processing
- 4:37Compiler plugins for code
- 7:52Load-time bytecode approaches
- 9:17Annotation processing comparison
- 10:40Key takeaways and future work
- 11:45Q&A
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