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)

Understanding channels

Channels are tools to allow safe communication between concurrent code. They allow concurrent code to communicate by sending messages. Channels can be thought of as pipelines for safely sending and receiving messages between different coroutines – no matter the thread in which they are running.

Let's look at some examples of how channels can be used in real-life, non-trivial scenarios. This will help you to understand how useful channels can be when implementing tasks that require many coroutines to do collaborative work. As an exercise, try to think of a way to solve the problems listed here without channels.

Use case – streaming data

Recently, I was faced with a relatively simple...