Book Image

Learning Concurrency in Kotlin

By : Miguel Angel Castiblanco Torres
Book Image

Learning Concurrency in Kotlin

By: Miguel Angel Castiblanco Torres

Overview of this book

Kotlin is a modern and statically typed programming language with support for concurrency. Complete with detailed explanations of essential concepts, practical examples and self-assessment questions, Learning Concurrency in Kotlin addresses the unique challenges in design and implementation of concurrent code. This practical guide will help you to build distributed and scalable applications using Kotlin. Beginning with an introduction to Kotlin's coroutines, you’ll learn how to write concurrent code and understand the fundamental concepts needed to write multithreaded software in Kotlin. You'll explore how to communicate between and synchronize your threads and coroutines to write collaborative asynchronous applications. You'll also learn how to handle errors and exceptions, as well as how to work with a multicore processor to run several programs in parallel. In addition to this, you’ll delve into how coroutines work with each other. Finally, you’ll be able to build an Android application such as an RSS reader by putting your knowledge into practice. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned techniques and skills to write optimized code and multithread applications.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Thread Confinement, Actors, and Mutexes

Kotlin offers plenty of tools that can be used to write concurrent code safely. In the previous chapter, we talked about channels in the context of collaborative concurrency; in this chapter, we will dive into more tools that can be used to avoid sharing states between threads. We will start by talking again about atomicity violation, and then we will talk about ways of avoiding it. This chapter presents many topics in the context of atomicity violation, but it's important to understand that they can be used in other scenarios – for example, you can prevent race conditions using the methods covered in this chapter as well.

Let's take a look at the topics that we will cover in this chapter:

  • Atomicity violation recap
  • Thread confinement
  • When and how to use thread confinement for safe concurrency
  • Actors
  • How actors work and...