I'm converting some existing Groovy/Gradle scripts to Kotlin DSL and found a bit of a gap in Kotlin's capability when it comes to reading arbitrary JSON. In these Groovy scripts, an arbitrary JSON structure is read from a file using the wonderfully named JsonSlurper and accessed via 'dot' path. e.g.

val buildConfig : Any? = JsonSlurper().parseText(buildConfigFile.readText())
val defaultInstallDir = buildConfig.SetupDefaults.InstallDir  // Not compiling as Kotlin compiler doesn't generate dynamic access code

I understand this kind of dynamicism is exactly where Groovy excels (and suffers in equal measure), where Kotlin is meant to be more type safe.

Maybe better to extract this parsing to buildSrc plugin and use proper type-safe deserializer? Because JsonSlurper is really bad when you want to use it with static types, you have to cast each element manually