Reified Generics
Explore how reified generics in Kotlin's inline functions allow precise type checking and cleaner code by overcoming JVM type erasure. Understand their benefits like using the is operator within functions, type inference support, and resolving overload conflicts. Learn to implement reified generics for smarter, more readable Kotlin code.
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We now know what inline functions are. Since inline functions are copied, we can get rid of one of the major JVM limitations: type erasure. After all, inside the function, we know exactly what type we’re getting.
Let’s look at the following example. We would like to create a generic function that will receive a Number ( Number can either be Int or Long ), but will only print it if it’s of the same type as the function type.
We’ll start with a naïve implementation, simply trying the instance check ...