Minikotlin

'by hand' is probably the AI anthropomorphizing itself

First of all, I was genuinely surprised to see this project make it so high on Hacker News. I actually didn’t know it had been posted here. I spent the entire day improving MiniKotlin’s test coverage, and only noticed what was happening when I checked the traffic on my server later that night.

I appreciate all feedback, both positive and negative. Criticism is part of building software, and I’m perfectly fine with that. What is a little discouraging, though, is seeing comments calling the project "AI-generated", "slop", or "useless" without first looking at how it actually works.

MiniKotlin currently passes 4,873 out of the 7,469 official Kotlin compiler tests. Whether people ultimately find the project useful or not is completely fair to debate, but I hope it can at least be judged on its technical merits.

I went through similar discussions when I released MiniSwift. At some point I realized that arguing about whether a project was "made by AI" or not is a bottomless pit, and honestly not a very productive conversation.

English isn’t my native language, and unfortunately it’s not something I’m particularly confident with. Because of that, I rely on AI tools for translation and polishing my writing.

I’ve been working as a software developer for about 25 years, including web development and JavaScript for most of that time. As for the website, yes, Claude helped polish the design. I’ve never tried to hide that. I spent a significant amount of time building and refining it myself, and then used AI as a design assistant to improve the final presentation.

Using AI to polish a website doesn’t mean the compiler itself was generated by AI. I think that’s an important distinction.

Honestly, I wish more of the discussion had been about the technical side of the project. MiniKotlin has been under development for nearly three years, and I’d be much happier answering questions about the compiler architecture, parser, semantic analysis, IR pipeline, or WASM backend than debating whether a landing page "looks like Claude."

Thanks for taking the time to look at the project.

Thanks! And no, that’s not really the goal.

This is just one piece of a much bigger ecosystem. The real goal is to solve the portability problem.

MiniSwift, MiniSharp, and MiniKotlin are all parts of another project I’m building called Kavak.

The idea is simple: people should be able to keep using the language and platform they already know, while still being able to target other platforms with the same application.

The browser playground is mostly a way to make the compiler instantly accessible. You can open it anywhere, experiment, debug, and see how everything works without installing anything. But it’s only one part of the bigger picture.

Thank you.

I agree. "One pass" is wrong, and I shouldn't have written that. This is a normal multi-stage pipeline: AST -> HIR -> MIR -> WASM-GC, meaning each reduction is one pass.

I know, Kotlin has forward references and actual type inference, so name/type resolution requires multiple passes, which is precisely why there's explicit forward reference processing there. So, a single pass is never the case. My statement was incorrect.

What I meant was that it goes from source code to WASM-GC in one go, entirely in the browser (no LLVM, no Binary, no round trip to the server, and the WASM-GC backend is handwritten in C).

> Honestly, I wish more of the discussion had been about the technical side of the project.

Then you would do well to spend a few hours during your three year project to write up a technical description that indicates you actually understand what you've published. Saying you don't speak English natively is a cop-out. LLMs are subpar at translation but if prompted to translate correct technical writing, the output would not have been what's on your front page. You can't possibly present poor technical writing and then expect people to give you more than what you gave them. And yet, I think people did spend more time writing about the technical writing than you did in prompting.

> At some point I realized that arguing about whether a project was "made by AI" or not is a bottomless pit

> Using AI to polish a website doesn’t mean the compiler itself was generated by AI. I think that’s an important distinction.

I notice you don't actually say this isn't AI-generated. You try to heavily imply it isn't with selective wording, yet stop short of denying that it is. And with a fully AI web design, fully AI descriptions, incorrect technical writing, no source code - why would anybody believe otherwise?