14-Dec

Kotlin metaprogramming with kotlinpoet

Wouldn't it be sweet if you could automate writing code. Well, that's what we're taking a look at today. Metaprogramming, code generation, or in short; writing kotlin code that generates even more kotlin code 🤯.

2 min read

By Nicklas Utgaard

December 14, 2020

Disclaimer: This article focuses on source code generation, and does not make any comparison to byte buddy, asm, javaassist or others.

Today we're going to take a look at kotlinpoet and some of the possibilities code generation offers.

In it's most simple form codegeneration can simply be any program, that when executed spits out valid sourcecode. As an example, a simple function which returns a print statement;

fun createHello(who: String) = "println(\"Hello, $who\")"

createHello("world") // return println("Hello, world")

There is nothing spectacular going on here. When it is executed it prints out some valid code, that we potentially could use later. But, lets make it more complex and at the same time introduce todays star kotlinpoet;

val packageName = "com.christmas.kotlin"
val className = "Code"

val cls = TypeSpec
  .classBuilder(className)

val file = FileSpec.get(packageName, cls.build())

println(file)

// ---- Returns ----

package com.christmas.kotlin

public class Code

Kotlinpoet doesn't do much in the example above, but as we'll see it will help us more further down the line. FileSpec and TypeSpec are kotlinpoet's representations of files and classes, and once we got a TypeSpec we can add in more stuff like properties, constructors and other functions.

To add a simple property to our Code class we use define a PropertySpec and add it to our already existing TypeSpec;

val cls = TypeSpec
  .classBuilder(className)
  .addProperty(PropertySpec
    // MUTABLE_LIST and STRING are predefined TypeName's included in kotlinpoet
    .builder("statements", MUTABLE_LIST.parameterizedBy(STRING))
    .initializer("mutableListOf()")
    .build()
  )

// ---- Returns ----
package com.christmas.kotlin

import kotlin.String
import kotlin.collections.MutableList

public class Code {
  public val statements: MutableList<String> = mutableListOf()
}

All of a sudden our class has a property and some import statements. Kotlinpoet keeps track of which import statements are needed to make our code work without us programming it explicitly. The complexity at this point is somewhat limited, but even now we get some help from the library.

Adding a function to our class continues in a similar vein;

val cls = TypeSpec.classBuilder(className)
  // .addProperty(...)
  .addFunction(FunSpec
    .builder("addStatement")
    .returns(ClassName(packageName, className))
    .addParameter("statement", STRING)
    .addStatement("this.statements += statement")
    .addStatement("return this")
    .build()
  )

// ---- Returns ----
package com.christmas.kotlin

import kotlin.String
import kotlin.collections.MutableList

public class Code {
  public val statements: MutableList<String> = mutableListOf()

  public fun addStatement(statement: String): Code {
    this.statements += statement
    return this
  }
}

Kotlinpoet correctly identified that the Code class is visible within our class, and thus didn't add an import or use the fully qualified name for the class. However, if we change the return type of our function to LONG it would include it as an import. Consequently it would also generate code that wouldn't compile as our function has return this which isn't a Long , whoopsi. Fortunately, we are generating kotlin source code, and the kotlin compiler would probably tell us that something was wrong.

This might seems like quite alot of work to get a small class. And while that might be true, it also opens up the possibility to automate some really cool stuff. Looking through the usage of kotlinpoet on mvnrepository we can see it being used by Arrow (Arrow-Meta), Microsoft Thrifty compiler plugin, the apollo-compiler and ExpediaGroup's graphql-kotlin.

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