I’m a big fan of the Kotlin programming language since it has been announced by JetBrains some times ago.
After Kotlin/Native became available including the ability to compile to native Raspberry Pi binaries I decided to play around with it and see what’s possible. The problem I’ve been facing is the fact that cross-compilation for Raspberry Pi requires a Linux system. Since I prefer to use my macOS system for developing I have been looking for an alternative to use a full blown Virtual machine. So I setup a docker image enabling me to run just the build process inside a docker container which itself is running in a Linux environment.
I’ve published the docker image on Docker Hub and Github in case anybody else wants to get into Kotlin/Native cross-compilation.
You can run a container interactively by issuing the following command:
docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/home/gradle -w /home/gradle roamingthings/kotlin-native /bin/bash
This will pull the image from Docker Hub, create a temporary container and put you into a shell. The current directory will be mapped as the project folder.
If you would like to use Gradle inside the container you may also want to map the .gradle and .konan folders so the dependencies and plugins only get downloaded once.
docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/home/gradle -v $HOME/.konan:/home/gradle/.konan -v $HOME/.gradle:/home/gradle/.gradle -w /home/gradle roamingthings/kotlin-native /bin/bash
Enjoy!