Can you explain the principle of the reified mechanism in Kotlin?

In Kotlin, the reified mechanism is used together with inline functions to preserve type information at runtime, which is usually impossible due to type erasure in the JVM.

When a function is declared as inline and the type parameter is marked as reified, you can use this type directly inside the function body, for example, for type checking or creating instances.

Example:

inline fun <reified T> isInstance(value: Any): Boolean {
    return value is T
}

fun main() {
    println(isInstance<String>("test")) // true
    println(isInstance<Int>("test")) // false
}

Without reified, such a check cannot be performed because type T is erased during compilation.