Strange missing infix operators

[Wasabi375]

@cretz

The only argument that can really be made here IMO is “why does Kotlin hamstring itself based on limitations in only one of its 3 platforms?” Unfortunately, this is the route they chose with a great many things.

While I agree with you there is a simple and good explanation for that. Kotlin decided to have java interop as one of the primary features. This is important because Kotlin tries to fight for the same platforms java does (js and native came later). Without java compatibility kotlin could never be seriously used for android and it also allows for a wide group of other jvm projects to switch to kotlin. This is one of the main reasons Kotlin is as popular as it is. It’s a great language but it also allows to easily switch to it.
As for Kotlin JS and Native, native is still experimental and JS was only released in Kotlin 1.2 I believe. This should explain why those platforms are not as influential as the jvm in regard to kotlins design.

@cretz

After some thought I do not believe that this is the reason for lack of shl / shr / ushr on bytes. I do not know and too would be curious why (experimental) and is ok but shl is not.

There was a post about this:

When does bit-fiddling come to Kotlin?

tl;dr We understand that a number of use cases related to bit-fiddling/hex number are painful in Kotlin, and we are working on it, but it’s a bit more complicated than one might think, and that’s why it’s taking us so much time. Kotlin 1.1 will ship a (small) number of new bitwise operations in the Standard Library, namely and / or / xor / inv for Byte and Short. These may seem straightforward wrt API design: byte bitwise-or another byte gives a byte, right? But we moved these functions to kot…

Also I guess the KEEP for unsigned types might be interesting as well:

Kotlin/KEEP/blob/master/proposals/unsigned-types.md