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

# coroutines

[Colton Idle]

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

[Ian Lake]

Events are not state

[Francesc]

and state flows are hot

[dbaelz]

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

[streetsofboston]

@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.

[Francesc]

right, and a mutableStateFlow is hot, which was my point, being hot may not be what you are after

[Colton Idle]

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

[Patrick Steiger]

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

[Arjan van Wieringen]

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.

[streetsofboston]

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).