Book Image

Learn Kotlin Programming - Second Edition

By : Stephen Samuel, Stefan Bocutiu
Book Image

Learn Kotlin Programming - Second Edition

By: Stephen Samuel, Stefan Bocutiu

Overview of this book

Kotlin is a general-purpose programming language used for developing cross-platform applications. Complete with a comprehensive introduction and projects covering the full set of Kotlin programming features, this book will take you through the fundamentals of Kotlin and get you up to speed in no time. Learn Kotlin Programming covers the installation, tools, and how to write basic programs in Kotlin. You'll learn how to implement object-oriented programming in Kotlin and easily reuse your program or parts of it. The book explains DSL construction, serialization, null safety aspects, and type parameterization to help you build robust apps. You'll learn how to destructure expressions and write your own. You'll then get to grips with building scalable apps by exploring advanced topics such as testing, concurrency, microservices, coroutines, and Kotlin DSL builders. Furthermore, you'll be introduced to the kotlinx.serialization framework, which is used to persist objects in JSON, Protobuf, and other formats. By the end of this book, you'll be well versed with all the new features in Kotlin and will be able to build robust applications skillfully.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Fundamental Concepts in Kotlin
5
Section 2: Practical Concepts in Kotlin
15
Section 3: Advanced Concepts in Kotlin

Context and scope

Every coroutine has an associated coroutine context, which is used to influence how a coroutine is handled at runtime. This context is an immutable set of elements where each element has a key and a value. You can think of the context as similar to a map, with each element in the context being a key-value entry in the map.

Since a context is immutable, adding or removing elements to a context results in a new context. To add new elements, the plus operator (+) is supported, for example:

coroutineContext + CoroutineName("my coroutine")

The context is used by various aspects of the coroutine library. A simple example is setting the name of the coroutine as shown in the last example. More advanced usages include controlling which thread or thread pool a coroutine should be dispatched on, or how a coroutine should handle uncaught exceptions.

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