January 2017
Intermediate to advanced
420 pages
9h 25m
English
Kotlin 1.1 has introduced a new feature for referring to verbose types called type aliases. As the name suggests, a type alias allow us to declare a new type that is simply an alias of an existing type. We do this using the typealias keyword:
typealias Cache = HashMap<String, Boolean>
They are especially useful as a replacement for complex type signatures. Compare the following and see which you think is more readable:
fun process(exchange: Exchange<HttpRequest, HttpResponse>): Exchange<HttpRequest, HttpResponse>
Or:
typealias HttpExchange = Exchange<HttpRequest, HttpResponse>
fun process2(exchange: HttpExchange): HttpExchange
A typealias carries no runtime overhead or benefit. The alias is simply replaced by the compiler. This means ...
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