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)

Sequences

Suspending sequences are quite different from suspending iterators, so let's take a look at some of the characteristics of suspending sequences:

  • They can retrieve a value by index
  • They are stateless, and they reset automatically after being interacted with
  • You can take a group of values with a single call

In order to create a suspending sequence, we will use the builder buildSequence(). This builder takes a suspending lambda and returns a Sequence<T>, where T can be inferred by the elements that are yielded, as for example the following:

val sequence = buildSequence { 
yield(1)
}

This will make the sequence a Sequence<Int>. But, similar to iterators, you can always specify a T as long as the values that are yielded are compliant:

val sequence: Sequence<Any> = buildSequence { 
yield("A")
yield(1)
yield(32L)
}
...