Kotlin works around this by not exposing the backing field directly; a "field" becomes a "property" which has a getter and setter under the hood. Attempts to read uninitialized properties are compile-time errors. You can turn these into runtime errors using the "lateinit" keyword.

Kotlin still has a hole where you can run code in "init" blocks which are executed sequentially on object construction; in one, you can call a function that is defined after an unmodifiable property, and it will see the uninitiailized value.