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)

Atomic data structures

During this chapter, we have covered how to write our own atomic blocks of code, but there's yet another topic that we need to mention regarding atomicity: atomic data structures. These are data structures that offer atomic operations out of the box.

Currently these atomic data structures are provided by the JVM, not Kotlin's standard library. So they may not be available if your code is for JS, Kotlin/Native, or multiplatform.

For example, using an atomic integer looks like the following:

val counter = AtomicInteger()
counter.incrementAndGet()

Because the implementation of incrementAndGet() is atomic, we can use it easily to implement a thread-safe counter:

var counter = AtomicInteger()

fun asyncIncrement(by: Int) = async {
for (i in 0 until by) {
counter.incrementAndGet()
}
}

We can call it from main like in our original implementation...