mercredi 8 mars 2017

Kotlin: How are a Delegate's get- and setValue Methods accessed?


I've been wondering how delegated properties ("by"-Keyword) work under-the-hood.
I get that by contract the delegate (right side of "by") has to implement a get and setValue(...) method, but how can that be ensured by the compiler and how can those methods be accessed at runtime?
My initial thought was that obviously the delegates must me implementing some sort of "SuperDelegate"-Interface, but it appears that is not the case.
So the only option left (that I am aware of) would be to use Reflection to access those methods, possibly implemented at a low level inside the language itself. I find that to be somewhat weird, since by my understanding that would be rather inefficient. Also the Reflection API is not even part of the stdlib, which makes it even weirder.

I am assuming that the latter is already (part of) the answer. So let me furthermore ask you the following: Why is there no SuperDelegate-Interface that declare the getter and setter methods that we are forced to use anyway? Wouldn't that be much cleaner?

The following is not essential to the question


The described Interface(s) are even already defined in ReadOnlyProperty and ReadWriteProperty. To decide which one to use could then be made dependable on whether we have a val/var. Or even omit that since calling the setValue Method on val's is being prevented by the compiler and only use the ReadWriteProperty-Interface as the SuperDelegate.

Arguably when requiring a delegate to implement a certain interface the construct would be less flexible. Though that would be assuming that the Class used is possibly unaware of being used as such, which I find to be unlikely given the specific requirements for the necessary methods. And if you still insist, here's a crazy thought: Why not even go as far as to make that class implement the required interface via Extension (I'm aware that's not possible as of now, but heck, why not? Probably there's a good 'why not', please let me know as a side-note).





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