Thursday, 23 October 2025

No "new" keyword in Kotlin

So I was wondering what my opinion is about that.

I don't like it a lot, as now it seems like calling a constructor looks similar to calling a method.

The only difference that's visible is that the constructor begins with a capital, and then only if you properly follow the coding style guidelines.

I noticed that where Java prefers clarity of purpose, Kotlin prefers brevity (and sacrifices clarity for this).

In Java the "new" keyword does a lot of heavy lifting, that is not part of the constructor. The constructor merely sets the internal structure of an object-to-be to appropriate values. The responsibility of actually making the object, registering it in de Heap, doing the pointer bits, is indicated by the new keyword.

What are your opinions?

References

Reddit - Is keyword new redundant?
https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/1n0m7cg/is_keyword_new_redundant/
Kotlin Documentation - Classes
https://kotlinlang.org/docs/classes.html

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