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)

Actors

Thread confinement works fine for the scenario mentioned previously, but say that we need a way to scale it for scenarios in which we need to modify the shared state from many different parts of the app, or if we want more flexibility on our atomic block. For more complicated scenarios, we can build upon the idea of thread confinement and improve our solution by using a concurrency primitive that we saw before: channels. By mixing both of them we can create an actor.

What is an actor?

Actors are a combination of two powerful tools: we can confine the accesses of a state to a single thread and allow other threads to request modifications to the state using channels. This way, we have not only a safe way to update the...