but feels like a hack

you can declare a function that has the same name as a constructor

And treat it like a factory?

Then you could create a extension property of type T.()->Unit and initialize it on the function with a closure that calls an extension method

however, that's inheritance

it's easier to extend a class

You can't have an extension constructor, as you can only make extension methods of this is the logic that extensions follow -> https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/general/p1462735330002798

@sdeleuze: it would be nice to see pros and cons of such a “foundation”. I personally don’t see much value in such a thing, it would slow down a lot. Provided we do communicate and listen and (I think) are generally very responsive to community, what would foundation improve?

Making a standard slow down a lot (see Dart example), but a not profit organization don’t slow down IMO, see Rust or Cloud Foundry examples.

I will try to elaborate more

But I think the Android topic is something that clearly show what could be the pro.

I mean allowing other companies to really contribute to the language significant parts

That’s why we are developing KEEP, and trying to create an Open Mind process, in addition to Open Source.

Indeed

So in practice you are quite close of such process

What I don’t want to see is “we think allopen is important, design it”, and rather see “here is KEEP proposal for allopen, we tried to think about everything, here is our best attempt, let’s discuss"

I agree

But it doesn’t need any foundation.

I personally think that the way you are dealing with community and feedbacks is awesome and very open minded

My foundation proposal is more about getting other companies than JetBrains strongly betting on Kotlin, like Google for Android

Given Google story with Oracle

I thought it could help

But I guess you have more infos than me 😉

I don’t think Google needs any foundation or something. See Android Studio story. They just need something working well, adopted by community and having a clean way forward. We don’t have any IntelliJ foundation or something.

how do you know it’s applicable to your scenario? have you measured the performance?

note that there are cases where marking a function as inline will actually hurt performance, because the bytecode size of the function will exceed a threshold, and Hotspot will not run its more efficient optimizations on it

one very special instance where you need to inline methods is to prevent offsets in stacktrace counting.

not an everyday task, for sure