yeah @nkiesel, I think the suspected use case for

val x by map

was that it would primarily operate on objects of disparate types (a le Javascript), thus I think the

by map

idea was largely aimed as a shim for dynamic languages into kotlin. But I could agree with your assestment, especially when we have access to raw types. Perhaps it would be better if we had something like

val map: Map<String, Any?> = ...
val name:String by map //compiler error: cannot use `Map<String, Any?> as delegate for `val name: String` expected Value type to be String but was Any?

val name: String by (map as Map) //compiler warning: unchecked raw type cast: Map<String, Any?> to Map
val name: String by @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")(map as Map) //compiles without issue

unfortunately its a moot point since any change would break backwards compatibility in a pretty big way

groostav: The following might be a better way than using a plain Map: class Safe<V>(val map: Map<String, V>) { operator fun getValue(t: Any?, k: KProperty<*>): V = map.get(k.name) ?: throw Exception() } class User(val map: Map<String, String>) { val name: String by Safe(map) } This at least now complaints if the property type and the map value type mismatch

yeah thats a very good point.