Is there a built in equivalent of `Observable.neve...

# coroutines

[Paul Woitaschek]

Is there a built in equivalent of Observable.never()?

[louiscad]

Yes, emptyFlow<Nothing>() or flow { awaitCancellation() } depending on your use case.

[Paul Woitaschek]

So there is nothing built in; emptyFlow is rather Observable.empty

[louiscad]

There are a bunch of operators that RxJava has that are replaced with onStart in Flow as well, and it's intentional (see Roman Elizarov talk at KotlinConf 2019)

[Paul Woitaschek]

Yeah, emptyFlow should have been replaced with flow {] as well 😛

[louiscad]

How would you name a function that does flow { awaitCancellation() }? 😝

[louiscad]

And how often do you need it?

[louiscad]

Personally… never

[Paul Woitaschek]

nothingEmittingForeverHangingFlow()

[louiscad]

That's mouthful

[Paul Woitaschek]

But funny

[louiscad]

Feel free to have it in your codebase 😄

[Manuel Wrage]

I called it "infiniteEmptyFlow" in my projects 😄

[ephemient]

MutableSharedFlow<Nothing>.asSharedFlow() also never emits or terminates

[ursus]

Can I ask the use case for never ? I use empty all the time though.

[bezrukov]

never is useful in unit tests, when some observable should be initialized, but you don't care about it

[Paul Woitaschek]

Yep. Especially when you have stuff like first() in the processing line