Why Kotlin does not have built in support for bina...

# announcements

[o.semen]

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?

[darych]

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

[darych]

I was fortunate and there were not so much Bytes, so I wrote an extension function.

[karelpeeters]

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

[karelpeeters]

At least that was the explanation half a year ago.

[o.semen]

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()

[bissell]

https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.serialization/blob/master/runtime/common/src/main/kotlin/kotlinx/serialization/PlatformUtils.kt

[bissell]

^ PlatformUtils in the serialization lib has String.toUtf8Bytes()

[bissell]

if you don't want the whole lib as a dependency should be easy to copy-paste