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)

Iterators, Sequences, and Producers

When dealing with data sources, it's common to retrieve and display information on demand. In a news reader, for example, you may want to fetch only some articles when the user first opens the app, and fetch more as the user scrolls down. And depending on the source of the information, this data can potentially be infinite.

In this chapter, we will talk about different ways to implement data sources as suspending functions and as async functions by leveraging Kotlin's concurrency primitives. We will start by doing sample implementations using the Fibonacci sequence both as an iterator and as a sequence, and then we will add suspending data retrieval to our RSS reader.

Some of the topics covered in this chapter are:

  • Suspendable sequences
  • Suspendable iterators
  • Yielding data in suspendable data sources
  • Differences between sequences and...