What is the point of

ByteArray

,

IntArray

,

CharArray

etc? why not just

Array<Byte>

,

Array<Int>

,

Array<Char>

. I know that Java does treat primitive arrays differently from object arrays, but couldn't Kotlin do us a solid and smoosh them all into just

Array<T>

?

That gets problematic when

Array<Int>

sometimes means

Integer[]

(when it's

Array<T>

and learns of its type at runtime) and other times means

int[]

.

Than it wouldn't be possible to distinguish between primitive and boxed arrays in source code, they are incompatible on binary level

Also, why does kotlin throw away the distinction between

int -> Int

and

Integer -> Int

but not

int[] -> IntArray

and

Integer[] -> Array<Int>

?

Int

refers to

int

except when generics or nullability are involved, in which case it becomes

Integer

. Converting between the two is trivial (relatively), so there's no issue. However, converting between

int[]

and

Integer[]

can be prohibitively expensive.

Also from Java it's not a problem to pass int to Integer or vice versa,, but primitive array are not interchangeable with Object arrays of corresponding types. One more reason for this, that you just cannot write a function that doesn't involve boxing for generic array, which essentially makes primitive arrays useless, if you need primitive array, you don't want to have boxing Think about primitive arrays as low level abstraction that useful in performance critical cases and provides efficient low level access to memory, but shouldn't be used in most other