Book Image

Kotlin Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By : Alexey Soshin
Book Image

Kotlin Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By: Alexey Soshin

Overview of this book

This book shows you how easy it can be to implement traditional design patterns in the modern multi-paradigm Kotlin programming language, and takes you through the new patterns and paradigms that have emerged. This second edition is updated to cover the changes introduced from Kotlin 1.2 up to 1.5 and focuses more on the idiomatic usage of coroutines, which have become a stable language feature. You'll begin by learning about the practical aspects of smarter coding in Kotlin, as well as understanding basic Kotlin syntax and the impact of design patterns on your code. The book also provides an in-depth explanation of the classical design patterns, such as Creational, Structural, and Behavioral families, before moving on to functional programming. You'll go through reactive and concurrent patterns, and finally, get to grips with coroutines and structured concurrency to write performant, extensible, and maintainable code. By the end of this Kotlin book, you'll have explored the latest trends in architecture and design patterns for microservices. You’ll also understand the tradeoffs when choosing between different architectures and make informed decisions.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Classical Patterns
6
Section 2: Reactive and Concurrent Patterns
11
Section 3: Practical Application of Design Patterns

Looking deeper into threads

Before we dive into the nuances, let's discuss what kinds of problems threads can solve.

In your laptop, you have a CPU with multiple cores – probably four of them, or even eight. This means that it can do four different computations in parallel, which is pretty amazing considering that 15 years ago, a single-core CPU was the default and even two cores were only for enthusiasts.

But even back then, you were not limited to doing only a single task at a time, right? You could listen to music and browse the internet at the same time, even on a single-core CPU. How does your CPU manage to pull that off? Well, the same way your brain does. It juggles tasks. When you're reading a book while listening to your friend talking, part of the time, you're not reading, and part of the time, you're not listening – that is, until we get at least two cores in our brains.

The servers you run your code on have pretty much the same...