Is it an anti-pattern to mixin a `CoroutineScope` ...

# coroutines

[Sam Garfinkel]

Is it an anti-pattern to mixin a CoroutineScope (with a delegate) on a class so that you can use Deferred as the value of its properties? This is kind of useful for creating lazily computed properties that are backed by network I/O (I’m using Ktor):

class Foo(val client: HttpClient) : CoroutineScope by GlobalScope {
  val bar: Deferred<String> by lazy {
    async { 
      client.get<String>("<https://www.example.com>")
    }
  }
}

[Sam Garfinkel]

I’m not really sure how else to cache the result of this call asynchronously. It may be expensive and is not something I want to compute multiple times. I have separate suspendable functions that depend on bar but I only want to compute bar when needed.

[streetsofboston]

I would put CorousineScope as a private val inside the Foo class, not have it implement it.

[streetsofboston]

But the general idea of lazily caching a async property-value is a good idea (depending on your app/use-case)

[Adam Powell]

and expose the fetch as a suspend fun, not a Deferred. Deferred is the implementation detail here

[Sam Garfinkel]

Can you provide an exemplar? The problem is a trivial suspend fun would compute the result each time. How would I implement the lazy functionality?

[streetsofboston]

A suspend fun can call await() on the deferred

[streetsofboston]

The first time it may actually suspend, the other times it will return immediately

[Adam Powell]

as only one reason of many, you don't want to expose the Deferred because then anyone can .cancel() it 🙂

[Sam Garfinkel]

suspend fun foo() = client.get<String>("<https://www.example.com>") would compute it each time.

[Sam Garfinkel]

I want to cache the result of the client.get since it’s expensive.

[Adam Powell]

yes it would, but suspend fun foo() = privateDeferredVal.await() would not.

[Sam Garfinkel]

Oh make the val private? I did that, I think I just forgot that in the example. So updated example:

private val bar: Deferred<String> by lazy {
  GlobalScope.async {
    client.get<String>("<https://www.example.com>")
  }
}

Is this the correct design?

[Adam Powell]

Now extract the GlobalScope into a private val passed to the constructor instead

[Sam Garfinkel]

Ah, so that the scope is bound to the parent. Right.

[Adam Powell]

Assume that any time you type GlobalScope it's probably wrong and you'll be on the right track more often than not 🙂 you also generally want your callers to be able to provide scopes to work in rather than hardcoding them

[Sam Garfinkel]

The main challenge here is I’m trying to create an API that wraps a REST API, but I need this to be usable from Java, potentially without direct coroutine support so users of the API don’t need to worry about coroutines. I guess maybe I should map everything into futures.

[Adam Powell]

that's one way to do it, you can offer static utilities that do the wrapping for you so that you can keep that goop out of your actual classes and their logic 🙂

[Adam Powell]

java code can also pass `CoroutineScope`s around without calling suspend functions

[Sam Garfinkel]

Do you have any examples of the static utilities part of that answer? The reality is that it’s significantly easier to serve all of the properties that are derived from the Deferreds, like bar in that example, from suspendable functions.

[Sam Garfinkel]

The REST API I’m using is pretty poorly formed, so I’m using JsonPath a lot to to extract only important information.

[Sam Garfinkel]

Which is why I have all of these derived properties (using that term loosely obviously since they’re actually suspendable functions)

[Adam Powell]

you could wrap the request result in an object with non-suspending derived property accessors. Use the suspend function (or a wrapper future) to obtain that result object, then perform normal gets on the derived properties

[Sam Garfinkel]

Ah gotcha, kinda like how Retrofit’s adapters return wrapped Pojos. Ok, maybe I’ll try that.

[zak.taccardi]

you also don’t need by lazy { .. }. Try async(start = CoroutineStart.LAZY) { .. } instead

This will avoid executing the coroutine until .await() is called

[Sam Garfinkel]

The point of the lazy call is to cache the Deferred, not to prevent the async from starting at initialization time.

[Adam Powell]

you don't need a lazy to cache a Deferred, a simple private val will do that 🙂

[streetsofboston]

Unless you want to wait kicking off the async until the bar is accessed for the first time, not kick it off immediately during the initialization of Foo

[Adam Powell]

Well right, but like @zak.taccardi mentioned, you can do that with async params too