Early question: interest in a large dependency / toolchain update PR (Kotlin 2.2.x, JVM 25, Gradle 9, …)?

[vilmosnagy]

Hi 👋,

Before opening a potentially large and intrusive PR, I wanted to ask for maintainer feedback first.

We’ve been experimenting with a patch for this project where we updated the core toolchain and dependencies to more recent versions, roughly along these lines:

• Kotlin / kotlinc -> 2.3.0
• JVM target / runtime -> Java 25
• Gradle -> 9.x
• plus the necessary transitive updates that follow from these changes.

At this stage, this is a very early draft:

• I’m a senior Java developer by background, but not an expert in Kotlin scripting nor Kotlin/Native
• the changes build and work for our internal use case, but I would not claim the patch is production-ready yet
• it would almost certainly need a thorough review, especially on the Kotlin/Native side

There are two potentially significant implications I want to be upfront about:

• Minimum SDK / runtime requirements would increase for consumers (this may or may not align with the project’s compatibility goals)
• Review effort would be non-trivial, and I’d expect guidance or requested changes from maintainers who know the codebase and Kotlin/Native constraints better than I do

Before investing more time into polishing this and opening a full PR, I wanted to ask:

• Would the project be open in principle to such a modernization PR?
• Are there known constraints (compatibility, tooling, Kotlin/Native stability, etc.) that would make this undesirable?
• Is there a preferred approach (incremental vs. big-bang update, feature flags, separate branch, etc.)?

Happy to provide more concrete details or a WIP branch if that helps the discussion.
Thanks for maintaining the project, and for any guidance you can share.