Okay, bear with me. Now that StateFlows are a thing... why would you use any other Flow? Isn't everything "state"?

Events are not state

and state flows are hot

What Ian said. Use flow a lot for stuff like events and one time messages

@Francesc Hot or cold flows are not defined whether they have state or not, whether they are conflated or not. StateFlows are 🔥 though 😀 Hot flows are active whether someone is listening/observing/collecting or not. Cold flows are only active while and as long someone is listening/observing/collecting.

right, and a

mutableStateFlow

is hot, which was my point, being hot may not be what you are after

Thank you all! A bit of Saturday morning pondering with my ☕

Consider a function that does some work and emit consecutive status updates to caller. It makes sense that ie returns a Flow built from

flow { }

Though I personally prefer to have updates sent as callbacks and result as the function return type

Events describe change, state describe “stationary” data. A state flow is a data type which has a defined state at every moment in time. How would you model a Kafka stream with Stateflow? There isn’t any defined state at every moment in time.

Kafka being an event driven architecture, a SharedFlow would fit. But stateful consumers of these events could model themselves upstream as a StateFlow (state is stored in a DB, for example).