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)

Mutual exclusions

So far, we have avoided atomicity violation by guaranteeing that all memory access in a block of code happens in a single thread. But there's yet another way for us to avoid two blocks of code from being executed concurrently: mutual exclusions.

Understanding mutual exclusions

We are looking for ways to synchronize a block of code so that it's not executed concurrently, thus eliminating the risk of atomicity violation. Mutual exclusion refers to a synchronization mechanism that guarantees that only one coroutine can execute a block of code at a time.

The most important characteristic of Kotlin's mutexes is that they are not blocking: the coroutines waiting to be executed will be suspended...