Book Image

Kotlin Quick Start Guide

By : Marko Devcic
Book Image

Kotlin Quick Start Guide

By: Marko Devcic

Overview of this book

Kotlin is a general purpose, object-oriented language that primarily targets the JVM and Android. Intended as a better alternative to Java, its main goals are high interoperability with Java and increased developer productivity. Kotlin is still a new language and this book will help you to learn the core Kotlin features and get you ready for developing applications with Kotlin. This book covers Kotlin features in detail and explains them with practical code examples.You will learn how to set up the environment and take your frst steps with Kotlin and its syntax. We will cover the basics of the language, including functions, variables, and basic data types. With the basics covered, the next chapters show how functions are first-class citizens in Kotlin and deal with the object-oriented side of Kotlin. You will move on to more advanced features of Kotlin. You will explore Kotlin's Standard Library and learn how to work with the Collections API. The book finishes by putting Kotlin in to practice, showing how to build a desktop app. By the end of this book, you will be confident enough to use Kotlin for your next project.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Concurrency constructs


If you ever wrote concurrent code in Java, you probably used some of its concurrency primitives. It might surprise you that Kotlin doesn’t have any constructs for dealing with concurrency as part of the language. The Kotlin design team felt that this should be the job of libraries. The Kotlin standard library has, in the base kotlin package and the kotlin.concurrent package, several functions, and annotations that can compile to Java's concurrency primitives.

Concurrent programming is a huge topic and we could write an entire book about it. So in this section, we’ll cover only what Kotlin has to offer for concurrent programming.

Starting a thread

Doing some work in a different thread can be done in Kotlin the same as in Java, by creating an instance of the Thread class with a Runnable function and then starting it. Kotlin also offers a shortcut function called thread that is a little bit easier to use. It has several default parameters and only needs a lambda that will...