Currently I am studying on KSP(Kotlin Symbol Processing), and I am curious about what does "Symbol" mean in KSP.

When it comes to comparing with KAPT, it says "To run Java annotation processors unmodified, KAPT compiles Kotlin code into Java stubs that retain information that Java annotation processors care about. To create these stubs, KAPT needs to resolve all symbols in the Kotlin program."

I don't know what does "all symbols in the Kotlin program" exactly mean?

CodePudding user response：

I understand "symbols" as declarations of interfaces, classes, functions, properties, etc. It doesn't include the body or the code itself, only the API, items that are visible to others.

This term is not specific to Kotlin. I can't find any definition of "symbols" on Wikipedia, but for example native libraries also contain symbol tables.

In this specific context it means that KAPT has to create a full list of all such symbols in Kotlin code and generate their equivalents in Java, so annotation processors could work on them. This is pretty wasteful as we recreate Kotlin code structure in Java just to throw it away seconds later and replace with true compiled code.