Effective Kotlin: Item 8 — Avoid finalizers and cleaners

Matthew Dolan

Feb 23, 2018·1 min read

With Joshua Bloch’s recently updated book, Effective Java, he talks about avoiding the use of finalizers and, if running Java 9, their replacement cleaners. One suggestion is to use try-with-resources, which doesn’t exist in Kotlin.

Instead, Kotlin introduces the extension function use which will call close() on a Closeable when the block provided completes or throws an exception.

inputStream.use {
    // do something with the stream
    it.read()
}