I should have mentioned that in both cases, it is a bit of a pipe dream to think you can envision what the compiler will churn out. Especially with one that is

I should have mentioned that in both cases, it is a bit of a pipe dream to think you can envision what the compiler will churn out. Especially with one that is constantly evolving like kotlinc. Some of the bad practices of 5 years ago have devolved into cargo cults and the compiler can actually handle these cases fine now. So I guess that this is not that great of a reason to choose either Java or Kotlin. In both cases, if performances are critical and lacking, you will have to whip out systrace and look at the bytecode.