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)

Continuation Passing Style

The actual implementation of suspending computations is done using CPS. This paradigm is based on the premise of sending a continuation to a function that is invoked, so that upon completion, the function will invoke the continuation. You can think of continuations as callbacks: whenever a suspending computation invokes another, it will pass a continuation that should be called upon completion or error.

All the heavy lifting is done by the compiler, which transforms all the suspending computations so that they send and receive said continuations—as we will see, this means that the actual signatures of suspending functions are not the same as what we define. On top of that, the suspending computations are transformed into state machines that can save and restore their state, and execute one portion of their code at a time—so whenever they...