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)

Context switching

One particularity of coroutines is that they can be resumed in a different context than the one they were initially started in. The CoroutineContext, as we have seen throughout the book, is not only about the thread or pool of threads to be used. It can contain other important configurations, such as exception handling.

As we saw at the beginning of the previous section, the Continuation interface defines that the CoroutineContext has to be stored inside the continuation. This guarantees that during execution, it will be possible to use that context when starting or resuming the continuation.

Let's take a look at how the context is set in order to allow thread switching.

Thread switching

There is one...