Dynamic Type

The dynamic type is not supported in code targeting the JVM {:.note}

Being a statically typed language, Kotlin still has to interoperate with untyped or loosely typed environments, such as the JavaScript ecosystem. To facilitate these use cases, the dynamic type is available in the language:

val dyn: dynamic = ...

The dynamic type basically turns off Kotlin's type checker:

• a value of this type can be assigned to any variable or passed anywhere as a parameter,
• any value can be assigned to a variable of type dynamic or passed to a function that takes dynamic as a parameter,
• null-checks are disabled for such values.

The most peculiar feature of dynamic is that we are allowed to call any property or function with any parameters on a dynamic variable:

dyn.whatever(1, "foo", dyn) // 'whatever' is not defined anywhere
dyn.whatever(*arrayOf(1, 2, 3))

On the JavaScript platform this code will be compiled "as is": dyn.whatever(1) in Kotlin becomes dyn.whatever(1) in the generated JavaScript code.

A dynamic call always returns dynamic as a result, so we can chain such calls freely:

dyn.foo().bar.baz()

When we pass a lambda to a dynamic call, all of its parameters by default have the type dynamic:

dyn.foo {
  x -> x.bar() // x is dynamic
}

For a more technical description, see the spec document.