What does using inline together with refied mean and what advantages does it provide?

In Android (Kotlin), the keyword inline is used for functions so that the compiler inserts the function body directly at the call site, reducing the overhead of function calls.

reified is used together with inline for generic functions to preserve type information at runtime, which is usually impossible due to type erasure in JVM.

Using inline with reified allows writing functions that can work with types directly, for example, for type checking or creating instances:

inline fun <reified T> Gson.fromJson(json: String): T {
    return this.fromJson(json, T::class.java)
}

Advantages:

• Allows using types at runtime without explicitly specifying the class.
• Reduces the overhead of function calls.
• Improves code readability and safety.

Thus, the combination of inline and reified extends the capabilities of working with generic types in Kotlin on Android.