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)

Job and Deferred

We can divide our asynchronous functions into two groups:

  • Those without a result. Common scenarios are background tasks that write to a log, send analytics, and similar tasks. This type can include background tasks that may be monitored for completion but that don't have a result.
  • Those that return a result. For example, if an asynchronous function is fetching information from a web service, you will most likely want to have that function return that information in order to use it.

In both cases, you will still want to have access to the task and react if there is an exception or cancel them if their work is not required anymore. Let's take a look at how we can create and interact with both types.

Job

...