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)

Types of channels and backpressure

The send() function in Channel is suspending. The reasoning behind this is that you may want to pause the code that is sending elements until there is someone actually listening for the data. This concept is often referred to as backpressure, and helps to prevent your channels from being flooded with more elements than the receivers can actually process.

In order to configure this backpressure, you can define a buffer for your channel. The coroutine sending data through the channel will be suspended when the elements in the channel have reached the size of the buffer. Once elements are removed from the channel, the sender will be resumed.

Unbuffered channels

Channels without a buffer are...