is it possible to use kotlin on the JVM or Android without a dependency on kotlin-stdlib?

Question

I have an android library that I distribute as a jar file; Currently it has zero dependencies (other than the things built into Java itself). I like the idea of porting it to kotlin, however I haven't been able to figure out how to do this without forcing a dependency on kotlin-stdlib (or kotlin-stdlib-jre7, etc)

I'm somewhat wary about doing this, because kotlin-stdlib gets updates very frequently (multiple times per month sometimes) and I don't want to cause a future compatibility problem.

Obviously if I use any of the kotlin specific functions or types (e.g. listOf, mapOf, etc) then of course I'd need the stdlib, but if I stick to pure java types and functions, then is this possible? And if so, how?

Answer 1

I am not sure this is what you are looking for but I was able to build and run run this simple program using IntelliJ Idea 2018.3

fun main() {
    System.out.println("hello world")
}

and the following build.gradle file

plugins {
    id 'org.jetbrains.kotlin.jvm' version '1.3.11'
}
apply plugin: 'application'
mainClassName = "MainKt"
version '1.0-SNAPSHOT'

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}


compileKotlin {
    kotlinOptions.jvmTarget = "1.8"
}
compileTestKotlin {
    kotlinOptions.jvmTarget = "1.8"
}

The only thing I saw in the jar file, other than a META-INF folder was my MainKt.class I was able to run this on the jvm using

java -classpath simple.jar MainKt

I think if you don't include the standard library you cant even use Kotlin's println function, so you have to resort to java's System.out.println method