Can someone ELI5 hot streams vs cold streams? I'm trying to wrap my head around Flow and I don't quite get it

hot streams start producing when you create them, e.g. with

produce

-- it immediately starts generating elements, although it will stop at the first

yield

but cold streams don't start producing until their terminal operation is called -- you can

map

them,

filter

them, etc., and no processing happens, until you call something like

collect

Oh well that's easy lol. When I was searching for explanations the articles got really into the weeds on the issue...

yea, Flow is an observable replacement

That's precisely the explanation I needed, thanks