Also no syntax is good until proven performant. Kotlin currently optimizes many

when

into table switches indexed that are very fast

This surprised me a lot because I did not know such a thing was possible in the JVM! I took a look at some bytecode generated from a

when

and all I see are chained

instanceof

calls. Did you mean this or am I missing something? I thought you meant a jump table that's constant time (much like haskell's pattern matching or a C

switch

statement)

what happen if you use when over ints?

I am using when. I am looking at bytecode generated from a when

I mean in the case when the subject is an int or a primitive value

Yeah no that's a proper jump table that's fine

so the trick is that you can change those instance of for actual indexes of int

That's clever! but yes for the average case it's not an issue