Why Kotlin does not have built in support for binary operations on Byte ? I tried code like this

val b1: Byte = 2
        val b3: Byte = 7
        val b4 = b1 xor b3

and IDEA suggested

import kotlin.experimental.xor

, but when I tried this:

val b1: Byte = 2
        val b3: Byte = 7
        val b4 = b1 shl b3

it does not have even anything to suggest. It is sad as I’m implementing CRC calculation that requires quite a lot of binary operations on bytes an each time I have to cast my bytes…. I do realise that it is possible to write extension. But I’m still wandering why Byte is not treated the same way Int and Long is?

I had the same question when I parsed our company' s internal binary network protocol.

It's on the todo list as part of a bigger thing with unsigned types etc.

Grate to here it @karelpeeters BTW I’m converting CRC Calculation in to multiplatform project and can not find an easy way to convert string to ByteArray. On JVM it’s as easy as

"123".toByteArray()