<h2 id="reflection">
<a class="header-anchor-link" href="#reflection" aria-hidden="true"></a> Reflection</h2>
<p>Reflection is a set of language and library features that allows for introspecting the structure of your own program at runtime</p>
<h2 id="reflection-is-distributed-as-a-seperate-artifact">
<a class="header-anchor-link" href="#reflection-is-distributed-as-a-seperate-artifact" aria-hidden="true"></a> Reflection is distributed as a seperate artifact</h2>
<p>On the JVM platform, the runtime component required for using the reflection features is distributed as a separate artifact kotlin-reflect.jar in the Kotlin compiler distribution. This is done to reduce the required size of the runtime library for applications that do not use reflection features.</p>
<h2 id="how-to-use-reflection-in-gradle">
<a class="header-anchor-link" href="#how-to-use-reflection-in-gradle" aria-hidden="true"></a> How to use reflection in Gradle</h2>
<p>Add the dependency on <code>kotlin-reflect</code></p>
<div class="code-block-container"><pre class="language-kotlin"><code class="language-kotlin">dependencies <span class="token punctuation">{</span>
  <span class="token function">implementation</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token string-literal singleline"><span class="token string">"org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-reflect:1.4.10"</span></span><span class="token punctuation">)</span>
<span class="token punctuation">}</span>
</code></pre></div><h2 id="class-references-reflection">
<a class="header-anchor-link" href="#class-references-reflection" aria-hidden="true"></a> Class references reflection</h2>
<p>The most basic reflection feature is getting thre runtime reference to a kotlin class</p>
<div class="code-block-container"><pre class="language-kotlin"><code class="language-kotlin"><span class="token keyword">val</span> c <span class="token operator">=</span> MyClass<span class="token operator">::</span><span class="token keyword">class</span>
</code></pre></div><p>The reference is a value of type <a href="https://kotlinlang.org/api/latest/jvm/stdlib/kotlin.reflect/-k-class/index.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">KClass</a>.</p>
<ul>
<li>Kotlin class referrence is different from a java class reference.</li>
<li>To obtain a java class reference use th <code>.java</code> property on a KClass</li>
</ul>
<div class="code-block-container"><pre class="language-kotlin"><code class="language-kotlin"><span class="token keyword">val</span> c <span class="token operator">=</span> MyClass<span class="token operator">::</span><span class="token keyword">class</span><span class="token punctuation">.</span>java
</code></pre></div><h2 id="links">
<a class="header-anchor-link" href="#links" aria-hidden="true"></a> Links</h2>
<p><a href="https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/reflection.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Reflection</a></p>


Kotlin Reflection

Reflection is distributed as a seperate artifact

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