Frequently Asked Questions

Why are builds so slow?

Long build and link times for simple projects may result from not using Kotlin/Native incremental compilation. To speed up builds, add the following line to your project’s gradle.properties file:

kotlin.incremental.native=true

The first build will take the usual time, but future builds should be much faster, often dropping from minutes to seconds. This setting enables incremental compilation of klib artifacts, reducing delays in subsequent builds.

Why does my build fail with ld.lld: error: undefined symbol: <some native symbol>?

This error occurs when one of your project’s dependencies references symbols that are unresolved on the host system. This often happens because the dependency was compiled with a different version of a native library than the one installed.

If these symbols are not required by your application, you can ignore them by adding the appropriate linker option to your Gradle configuration based on your operating system:

For Linux:

freeCompilerArgs += listOf("-linker-option", "--unresolved-symbols=ignore-in-object-files")

This tells the linker to skip unresolved symbols in object files, but it will still check for symbols in libraries.

For macOS:

freeCompilerArgs += listOf(
    "-linker-option", "-undefined",
    "-linker-option", "dynamic_lookup"
)

This tells the linker to ignore unresolved symbols and attempt to resolve them dynamically at runtime if needed.

Note: If you’re using the official gtk-kn Gradle plugin, these settings are applied automatically depending on the target operating system. If you’re still seeing this error, the problem may lie elsewhere.