I’m looking for an alternative to flow.emit(). I w...

# coroutines

[droidrcc]

I’m looking for an alternative to flow.emit(). I would need of a data structure (a sized circular buffered list) that would be “coroutine-safe” and the “put” operation is not blocking. The producer should not depend on the consumer and, it should be able to emit data even if there are no consumers listening.
I was thinking to Channels, but they offers non-suspending send() only when declared Channel.UNLIMITED.
Do you have any suggestion?

[octylFractal]

I'm going to assume by "not blocking" you mean "not suspending" -- how do you expect to accomplish this without a potentially unlimited size buffer?

[octylFractal]

the only other alternative is to drop items somewhere, otherwise it must suspend to wait for the buffer to have free space

[droidrcc]

yes, sorry by non-blocking I meant not suspending. Buffer should be limited, old values should be replaced by fresh ones (as a circular buffer)

[droidrcc]

something similar to BufferUtils.synchronizedBuffer(CircularFifoBuffer())

[octylFractal]

I think you'd probably have to implement this yourself, though you might be able to re-use mechanics from Channel.CONFLATED

[droidrcc]

Thanks Octavia, I thought something was already out there… 😞

[octylFractal]

I'm not familiar with any coroutines libraries myself unfortunately, there might be something that I don't know about

[octylFractal]

personally I haven't yet had the need to go looking

[droidrcc]

found something here: http://blog.pronghorn.tech/optimizing-suspending-functions-in-kotlin/

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

I think your use case is covered by the upcoming MutableSharedFlow and the BufferOverflow.KEEP_LATEST strategy.

https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.coroutines/issues/2034

[droidrcc]

Thanks @Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]! I think it will handle my use case …