Book Image

Kotlin Programming Cookbook

By : Aanand Shekhar Roy, Rashi Karanpuria
Book Image

Kotlin Programming Cookbook

By: Aanand Shekhar Roy, Rashi Karanpuria

Overview of this book

The Android team has announced first-class support for Kotlin 1.1. This acts as an added boost to the language and more and more developers are now looking at Kotlin for their application development. This recipe-based book will be your guide to learning the Kotlin programming language. The recipes in this book build from simple language concepts to more complex applications of the language. After the fundamentals of the language, you will learn how to apply the object-oriented programming features of Kotlin 1.1. Programming with Lambdas will show you how to use the functional power of Kotlin. This book has recipes that will get you started with Android programming with Kotlin 1.1, providing quick solutions to common problems encountered during Android app development. You will also be taken through recipes that will teach you microservice and concurrent programming with Kotlin. Going forward, you will learn to test and secure your applications with Kotlin. Finally, this book supplies recipes that will help you migrate your Java code to Kotlin and will help ensure that it's interoperable with Java.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

How to use coroutines to achieve multithreading


Coroutines are a great language feature in Kotlin. Here's an apt definition of coroutines according to the documentation:

"Coroutines are a new way of writing asynchronous, non-blocking code (and much more)."

It's not just the ease of use, it's much more powerful than threads, especially in the case of a mobile environment where even milliseconds of performance gain is appreciated. Spawning multiple threads can cause performance issues, which isn't the case with coroutines since there can be thousands of those running without much drop in performance levels.

The following is what the official documentation of Kotlin says:

"One can think of a coroutine as a lightweight thread. Like threads, coroutines can run in parallel, wait for each other, and communicate. The biggest difference is that coroutines are very cheap, almost free; we can create thousands of them, and pay very little in terms of performance. True threads, on the other hand, are expensive...