Codegen with KSP: A Farewell to Stubs

Hello, fellow Kotliners!

It's time for our next virtual get-together. This time, David Rawson brings his talk "Codegen with KSP: A Farewell to Stubs" on our stage.

Here is the abstract:
Kotlin Symbol Processor (KSP) is a new tool from Google that promises strong improvements over legacy javax.lang.model annotation processors that run with kapt. These are both slow and hard to maintain. Slow because they require generation of Java stubs for your Kotlin code. Hard to maintain because they require you to painstakingly translate Kotlin syntax into foreign abstractions like Element.

Say “farewell” to stubs and the resulting slow builds by using KSP. After explaining the need for annotation processors and meta-programming for handling cross-cutting concerns, we will build and test a toy annotation processor live on screen. This will give you the confidence to attempt more complex KSP codegen in your project.

For projects with legacy processors that can’t be rewritten, we will cover Google’s XProcessing library that has been used in Room and Epoxy. We will also explain multi-round processing and incremental processing (aggregate and isolating outputs).

About the speaker:
David Rawson has worked in some of Australia and NZ’s largest Kotlin shops and has presented at GDG DevFest Sydney, Chicago Roboto, and Droidcon APAC.

We are also constantly looking for speakers and talks. Please let us know and don't be shy, we are a friendly bunch and are happy to help you with your speaker career.

You can reach us here through meetup or on the #vkug channel on the Kotlinlang Slack. Get an invitation here: https://surveys.jetbrains.com/s3/kotlin-slack-sign-up