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Document Kotlin declaration-site variance subtleties
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sdeleuze committed Oct 9, 2023
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Expand Up @@ -236,6 +236,42 @@ be matched, not only the `GET` method.



[[declaration-site-variance]]
== Declaration-site variance

Dealing with generic types in Spring applications written in Kotlin may require, for some use cases, to understand
Kotlin https://kotlinlang.org/docs/generics.html#declaration-site-variance[declaration-site variance]
which allows to define the variance when declaring a type, which is not possible in Java which supports only use-site
variance.

For example, declaring `List<Foo>` in Kotlin is conceptually equivalent to `java.util.List<? extends Foo>` because
`kotlin.collections.List` is declared as
https://kotlinlang.org/api/latest/jvm/stdlib/kotlin.collections/-list/[`interface List<out E> : kotlin.collections.Collection<E>`].

This needs to be taken in account by using the `out` Kotlin keyword on generic types when using Java classes,
for example when writing a `org.springframework.core.convert.converter.Converter` from a Kotlin type to a Java type.

[source,kotlin,indent=0]
----
class ListOfFooConverter : Converter<List<Foo>, CustomJavaList<out Foo>> {
// ...
}
----

When converting any kind of objects, star projection with `*` can be used instead of `out Any`.
[source,kotlin,indent=0]
----
class ListOfFooConverter : Converter<List<*>, CustomJavaList<*>> {
// ...
}
----

NOTE: Spring Framework does not leverage yet declaration-site variance type information for injecting beans,
subscribe to https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/issues/22313[spring-framework#22313] to track related
progresses.



[[testing]]
== Testing

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