What is the reason I have to manually

close()

an

HttpClient

? Why isn’t it designed so that the

HttpClient

is bound to a

CoroutineScope

and automatically closes when the scope is canceled/completed? Isn’t this breaking structured concurrency (or at least requires workarounds)?

How should a CoroutineScope know that operation is needed? they are two different objects. If you had an HttpClientCoroutineScope, then that could make sense. Maybe try to define a httpClientCoroutineScope fun wrapping coroutineScope fun?

I don’t know what you mean 🤔

coroutineScope {
   HttpClient().request(…)
}

The

HttpClient

should either be closed with the scope, or the

HttpClient

be closed automatically when the scope is manually canceled.

There is little guidance on the ktor docs on how to handle the HttpClient instance. What we do is we create a holder object for the http client where we instantiate it as a val. This httpClient is never closed. It will stay there as long as the app runs.

That doesn’t work well with unit testing though.