<Six simple ways to start a coroutine>—because finding a way to actually call a suspending function ...

# feed

[Sam]

Six simple ways to start a coroutine—because finding a way to actually call a suspending function in the first place can feel like one of the biggest roadblocks to getting started with async Kotlin.

[Sam]

It's great to have time to write some other stuff again now that my book is finally close to being finished! This article is a bit different from what I've written before—designed to be more succinct and actionable for new coroutine users, rather than an in-depth exploration. I hope it's useful!

[CLOVIS]

Any reason to recommend MainScope over a custom CoroutineScope with your own Job and a dispatcher? MainScope is single-threaded, isn't it?

[Arjan van Wieringen]

Yeah, that will be a must-buy for me!

[Sam]

Any reason to recommend MainScope over a custom CoroutineScope […]?

Just that it's easier. When MainScope is available, it "just works"—you don't need to know what a Job is, and you avoid threading issues in UI code. I guess I'm treating multithreading and custom jobs as more advanced features that you can add in later, if you need them.

[CLOVIS]

I see. I think it's a missed opportunity that the only multithreaded approach in the article is GlobalScope . I think people who want to learn coroutines tend to be interested in multithreading.

[Sam]

That's good feedback, thanks! I'll have a think about how I could incorporate it into the article.

[CLOVIS]

Great article though! Really well written. But I think it needs a mention of multithreading to become the true reference on the topic

[Pablichjenkov]

I would emphasize more in not using runBlocking at all. I had it in my App in production for one release and I had to remove it. It crashed with really cryptic messages

[Sam]

Thanks for the comments! I've made a few changes.

[Klitos Kyriacou]

That's a very good article, Sam. However, I'm still unsure what the best option is for a typical situation of a Spring Boot application, where a non-suspend callback function (called from a Spring component) has to call a suspend function.

In fact, what I would find a great reference tool would be a flowchart-like decision tree, with questions like "Is your app an Android app?" - then do ABCD; else - is your app a desktop application? then next question, do you have a function that can't be a suspend function (because it's called from a Java method) but has to call a suspend function? then do XYZ.

[Sam]

This is a great idea, maybe I'll try to make something like that! Need to find a good tool for making an interactive flowchart like that...