I see this remark often, and there's something here I don't understand. If I call

.receive()

on a non-blocking NIO channel, it will immediately return with either some available data, or

null

. So if I were to use this in a coroutine, I'd have to do this in an infinite loop, no? Something like:

while(true) {
   channel.receive(buffer)
   // handle data if available
}

If I were to implement it like this, wouldn't that make the CPU load 100%? Or am I supposed to implement a delay here to prevent this?

You should not use NIO directly. It is very, very, low-level IO API. Use some higher-level async IO library.

Thanks for the reply, which luckily confirms a number of my suspicions 🙂 I just see 'don't use blocking IO' so much that one would think it's obvious how to use non-blocking, while (as you rightfully say) non-bocking and async are two different things. Thanks again!

You can ask on #ktor if you don't find anything on it.