Best practice - Where to put my class constants

[Wasabi375]

@adegorre

In the case of #3, if this is a val declaration and the right hand side of = is a constant expression (for instance a string literal, like in this example), wouldn’t the JVM be able to optimize this away as a static field?

No it can’t. This would break the ABI if you change it from val to var at a later point. That said the JVM might inline this during runtime which would have basically the same effect.

@adegorre

That said, in the case of string literals, this wouldn’t be a big optimization since the string content itself is stored only one time in memory. The optimization would only save 32 bits per instance (the string reference).

I think some older versions of android don’t do this, but I agree marking something as const is mostly a statement of intent than real functionality. The only real difference in my oppinion is that const can be used as a parameter for annotations.