How prevent type inference?

[Wasabi375]

As far as I know it is not possible yet. There are a few internal annotations used for this in the standard library but they are not publicly usable. There is another discussion with the same problem here where Ilya explains this

Inference with unexpected outcome

In Java Iterable interface is invariant, and in Kotlin it’s covariant. Usually Java methods taking Iterable are declared as: private static <T> void fun(Iterable<? extends T> it, T value) { } And that allows calling it the same way as in Kotlin: fun(it, 5); where it is a List<String>. Casting Iterable<Int> to Iterable<Any> is an upcast in Kotlin, same as casting Int to Any. Do you feel that the latter should be prohibited? As to why Any is inferred for T there — it’s the same reason why we…

TL;DR of it: they know that this is useful but have not made it public yet because they are not sure of the design of those annotations.