Kotlin 1.8 will completely remove Kotlin Synthetics

The Kotlin Android Extensions Gradle plugin was originally developed by JetBrains and released in 2017. This plugin provides two excellent features for Android development, namely Synthetics and Parcelize.

Synthetic allows developers to reduce the use of findViewById and can be achieved by binding with kotlinx.android.synthetic; while Parcelize allows developers to implement Parcelable with the @Parcelize annotation without writing template code.

Although Synthetic has good advantages, it also has disadvantages such as polluting the global namespace, not exposing nullability information, and only supporting Kotlin code.

Because of these shortcomings, the Android team later released View Binding to replace findViewById. View Binding is a feature that allows developers to more easily write code that interacts with views. Once View Binding is enabled in a module, it generates a binding class for each XML layout file in the module. An instance of the binding class contains direct references to all views that have IDs in the corresponding layout.

In order to support a better solution, in November 2020, the Android development team announced that the Android Kotlin Extensions Gradle plug-in had been deprecated and recommended that developers delete the plug-in from their projects. In order to give developers more time to complete the migration, the Android development team also extended the support period.

Now, the Android team has set a deadline for migration: the plugin will be completely removed in Kotlin 1.8, which is expected to be released at the end of 2022. By then, if your project still depends on this plugin, developers will not be able to update to the latest Kotlin version.

Developers do not need to worry about Parcelize, another feature included in this plugin. Parcelize can now be used in the independent kotlin-parcelize plugin with no functional changes.

This article is reproduced from OSCHINA

Title of this article: Kotlin 1.8 will completely remove Kotlin Synthetics

This article address: https://www.oschina.net/news/184251/discontinuing-kotlin-synthetics