Equality

In Kotlin there are two types of equality:

• Structural equality (a check for equals()).
• Referential equality (two references point to the same object);

Structural equality

Structural equality is checked by the == operation (and its negated counterpart !=). By convention, an expression like a == b is translated to:

a?.equals(b) ?: (b === null)

I.e. if a is not null, it calls the equals(Any?) function, otherwise (i.e. a is null) it checks that b is referentially equal to null.

Note that there's no point in optimizing your code when comparing to null explicitly: a == null will be automatically translated to a === null.

Floating point numbers equality

When an equality check operands are statically known to be Float or Double (nullable or not), the check follows the IEEE 754 Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic.

Otherwise, the structural equality is used, which disagrees with the standard so that NaN is equal to itself, and -0.0 is not equal to 0.0.

See: Floating Point Numbers Comparison.

Referential equality

Referential equality is checked by the === operation (and its negated counterpart !==). a === b evaluates to true if and only if a and b point to the same object. For values which are represented as primitive types at runtime (for example, Int), the === equality check is equivalent to the == check.