Book Image

Functional Kotlin

Book Image

Functional Kotlin

Overview of this book

Functional programming makes your application faster, improves performance, and increases your productivity. Kotlin supports many of the popular and advanced functional features of functional languages. This book will cover the A-Z of functional programming in Kotlin. This book bridges the language gap for Kotlin developers by showing you how to create and consume functional constructs in Kotlin. We also bridge the domain gap by showing how functional constructs can be applied in business scenarios. We’ll take you through lambdas, pattern matching, immutability, and help you develop a deep understanding of the concepts and practices of functional programming. If you want learn to address problems using Recursion, Koltin has support for it as well. You’ll also learn how to use the funKtionale library to perform currying and lazy programming and more. Finally, you’ll learn functional design patterns and techniques that will make you a better programmer.By the end of the book, you will be more confident in your functional programming skills and will be able to apply them while programming in Kotlin.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Introduction to coroutines


Let's start with a simple example without coroutines:

import kotlin.concurrent.thread

fun main(args: Array<String>) {
   thread {
      Thread.sleep(1000)
      println("World!")
   }
   print("Hello ")
   Thread.sleep(2000)
}

The thread function executes a block of code in a different thread. Inside the block, we are simulating an expensive I/O computation (such as accessing data from a microservice over HTTP) with Thread.sleepThread.sleep will block the current thread for the number of milliseconds passed as a parameter. In this example, we don't wait until the computation finishes to keep working on other things; we print another message, "Hello", while the other computation is being executed. At the end, we wait for two seconds until the computation is finished.

That's not a pretty code, and we can do better: 

fun main(args: Array<String>) {
   val computation = thread {
      Thread.sleep(1000)
      println("World!")
   }
   print("Hello ")
  ...