What's heavy-handed about Kotlin's apply? It's just an extension function in the standard library (so not a separate language feature, if that's what you mean b

What's heavy-handed about Kotlin's apply? It's just an extension function in the standard library (so not a separate language feature, if that's what you mean by "heavy"?) and solves the problem cleanly IMHO. You can easily implement a similar extension function in C#, although the syntax is slightly uglier and you don't get the implicit receiver in the lambda.