Functional Kotlin

Local delegates

Delegation is powerful, we've already seen that, but think of a common situation where inside a method we declare and initialize a property, then we apply a logic which will either use the property or will continue without it. For example, the following is such a program:

fun useDelegate(shouldPrint:Boolean) { 
    val localDelegate = "Delegate Used" 
    if(shouldPrint) { 
        println(localDelegate) 
    } 
     
    println("bye bye") 
} 

In this program, we will use the localDelegate property, only if the shouldPrint value is true, else we won't use it. But it would always take space in memory since it is declared and initialized. An option to avoid this memory blockage is to have the property inside the if block, but it's a simple dummy program, and ...