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)

The Internals of Concurrency in Kotlin

It's important that you have an idea of how suspending computations actually work. In this chapter, we will analyze how compiler transforms suspending functions into state machines, how the thread switching happens, and how exceptions are propagated. Some things that will be covered in this chapter are listed here:

  • Continuation Passing Style (CPS) and how it's related to suspending computations
  • Many different internal classes that are used when the coroutines are compiled into bytecode
  • The Flow of interception of a coroutine, including how threads are switched
  • Exception propagation with and without a CoroutineExceptionHandler

During the early sections of this chapter, we will be transforming a suspending function, imitating the work that the compiler does. Please notice that the code we write will not match the bytecode generated...