Extension Shadowing for Actual Declarations in KMP

Heads-up: this article assumes familiarity with Kotlin’s extension functions and expect and actual declarations in Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP).

My work has recently focused on “commonizing”¹ APIs, and I came across KT-70012, which I believe merits attention.

In Kotlin JVM development, the EXTENSION_SHADOWED_BY_MEMBER warning indicates that an extension function is redundant, as it will always be overshadowed by a member function with the same name when invoked. However, in KMP, this behaviour can be useful, as shadowing may occur on some platforms but not all.

Starting with Kotlin 2.1.0-Beta1, this warning will be removed in such cases. While this won’t change any behaviour, it will validate shadowing as a legitimate use case for KMP.

This allows for effective strategies when commonizing existing APIs that need to remain backwards compatible, especially those not initially developed with Kotlin in mind.

Let’s explore a naive use case for Android: Bundle.putBoolean(String?, Boolean)

// Common
expect class Bundle
expect fun Bundle.putBoolean(key: String, value: Boolean)

// Android
actual typealias Bundle = android.os.Bundle
actual inline fun Bundle.putBoolean(key: String, value: Boolean) {
  error("Extension shadowed by member")
}

// Non-Android
actual class Bundle(map: Map<String, Any?>)
actual fun Bundle.putBoolean(key: String, value: Boolean) {
    map[key] = value
}

Let’s break this down:

1. expect class Bundle is an opaque type with no members in commonMain.
2. expect fun Bundle.putBoolean(key, value) matches the signature of the original putBoolean method, but changes the first parameter from String? to String.

With this setup:

• On Android, putBoolean won’t exist at runtime and will always be superseded by the original member function.
• On other platforms, the extension function will be utilized instead.
• It enables stricter types for shadowed members (e.g., changing key: String? to key: String since the types are compatible).
• The new type alias remains backward compatible with existing APIs.

The EXTENSION_SHADOWED_BY_MEMBER warning is expected to be removed in Kotlin version 2.1.0. I hope to see more documentation on extension shadowing for actual declarations and clarification on what we can expect from the final bytecode on platforms where methods are shadowed.

For now, however, it remains an interesting concept to explore in side projects.

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