Why doesn’t the T of `Comparator<T>` have in...

# announcements

[araqnid]

Why doesn’t the T of Comparator<T> have input variance? I was trying to assign a Collator (which for some reason is a Comparator<Object> in Java) to Comparator<String>. Is it because it’s simply a typealias?

[Andreas Sinz]

exactly

[araqnid]

although it being a typealias is just a platform concern-- it does feel like it should be <in T> in stdlib-common. I can work around with Comparator(collator::compare) though

[Andreas Sinz]

The problem is that Comparator<T> is defined in the java stdlib, so kotlin is unable to change that