Why is get () used in this viewBinding example?

Question

I want to know why "private val binding get() = _binding!!" was used here?

 private var _binding: ResultProfileBinding? = null
private val binding get() = _binding!!

override fun onCreateView(
    inflater: LayoutInflater,
    container: ViewGroup?,
    savedInstanceState: Bundle?
): View? {
    _binding = ResultProfileBinding.inflate(inflater, container, false)
    val view = binding.root
    return view
}

override fun onDestroyView() {
    super.onDestroyView()
    _binding = null
}

Answer 1

I am assuming that you got that code from this page in the documentation.

Their objective is to give you a way to access the _binding value without needing to deal with the fact that _binding can be null. In the portion of their example that you did not include, they have a comment on binding that points out that it can only be used between onCreateView() and onDestroyView(). If you are in a part of your code where you can guarantee that your code will execute between those two callbacks, you can reference binding, which will return the value of _binding coerced into a not-null type (ResultProfileBinding instead of ResultProfileBinding?).

However, if you get it wrong, and you try referencing binding before onCreateView() or after onDestroyView(), you will crash with a NullPointerException.

Personally, I would avoid this approach.