Kotlin Coroutines - Introduction

Just like async/await in Javascript and C#, Kotlin Couroutines is trying to make asyncrhronous programming easier by enabling you to write async code with imperative style

To give you better understanding what Kotlin Couroutines looks like here's a snippets for comparison between Java basic Thread, RxJava Completable and Kotlin Coroutines

Given 3 job very different jobs that return Void, we want to run it sequentially asynchronously and return

Job 1
Job 2
Job 3
Job Complete

please note all the codes is written in Kotlin

Java Thread

The problem on the code below is the anti-pattern/code smell called Callback Hell

fun printInThread() {
    firstJob {
        otherJob {
            otherOtherJob {
                println("Job Complete")
            }
        }
    }
}

RxJava Completable

Of course we can make this better, you can wrap your jobs in one Action or you could use Kotlin lambda with receiver and or extension method

After all, what makes Kotlin Couroutines syntax looking good is becase Kotlin language features (AFAIK)

Sorry for not having a better demo, not in the mood to write complicated sample \ud83d\ude1e

Completable.fromAction { println("Rx Job 1") }
            .andThen(Completable.fromAction { println("Rx Job 2") })
            .andThen(Completable.fromAction { println("Rx Job 3") })
            .doOnComplete { println("Job Complete") }
            .subscribeOn(Schedulers.computation())
            .subscribe()

Kotlin Coroutines

Finally with Coroutines there's so much fun! Notice the runBlocking? That's what make all the jobs running in sequence, with it this async jobs is just another block of imperative code. Notice the also?

fun printInCoroutines() = runBlocking {
    firstJob() // you can also use `suspend` keyword
    async(CommonPool) { println("Coroutines Job 2") }
    async(CommonPool) { println("Coroutines Job 3") }
}.also {
    println("Job Complete")
}

suspend fun firstJob(){
    println("Coroutines Job 1")
}

You can also view all the snippets here in my Github repo here

There's so much to learn and experiment with Kotlin Couroutines. I heard you can run compose RxJava in it too. Curious?