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Something I noticed in build.gradle when I use android studio canary.
What exactly is its intended use?
kotlinOptions.useIR = true
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What is IR backend? After the compiler frontend is done analyzing the code, the backend generates the executables. We have three backends: Kotlin/JVM, Kotlin/JS, and Kotlin/Native. The first two were historically written independently and didn't share much code.
The Kotlin compiler for JVM compiles Kotlin source files into Java class files. The command-line tools for Kotlin to JVM compilation are kotlinc and kotlinc-jvm . You can also use them for executing Kotlin script files.
Kotlin is a general purpose, free, open source, statically typed “pragmatic” programming language initially designed for the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) and Android that combines object-oriented and functional programming features. It is focused on interoperability, safety, clarity, and tooling support.
Actually is no more actual. "Since Kotlin 1.5.0, JVM IR is the default backend, so useIR = true no longer has any effect. We should deprecate this option in 1.5 and remove it in a future release."
A use case helps you understand where errors could occur in the process and design features to resolve those errors. Three elements that a use case must contain: Actor, which is the user, which can be a single person or a group of people, interacting with a process
In simple terms, a user interface is the features of a device or an application that allow a user to interact with it.
The mantra in UX design is that some user research is always better than none. It’s likely at some point in your UX career that you will come across the first challenge of any UX designer —convincing a client or your team to include user research in a project. User research keeps user stories at the center of your design process.
This is an option for the Kotlin compiler which is mostly useful if you plan on going multiplatform. Earlier this year the new Kotlin Compiler was announced to be stable and that was ready for use. See this post
Now, what's IR?
Compilers usually have mainly two components:
A compiler frontend takes care to check your program is valid and makes sense by performing some syntactic and grammatic validation.
After the frontend is sure the program you've written is correct it proceeds to generate things like a derived syntax tree from your source files.
There's some discussion whether the task I'm about to describe is performed by a the frontend or a third module called a "middle-end".
Besides these data-structures, compiler frontends (or middleends), can also output something called IR which stands for (Intermediate Representation or Internal Representation) which basically is a simplified (using less complex instructions) version of your program.
This intermediate representation is later taken by the compiler backend to generate target code:
Here's a diagram
Forgot to add it into the diagram but the last three boxes are all compiler backends
Now; with all this chatter:
What does the useIR option do? Essentially use the intermediate representation to generate the target code for your platform
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