I don't get the rxjava coroutines. Isn't the rxjava specifically designed for thread switching and combining data flows? What benefit do coroutines give?

paulwoitaschek: The primary benefit of coroutines is that you can encode your async computations explicitly, without having to resort to callbacks (aka callback hell) nor to combinators/FP (aka RX) neither of which scale to complex business logic. More examples are given in coroutines design doc: https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlin-coroutines/blob/master/kotlin-coroutines-informal.md

So if its designed so one does not have to use rx, why is there a rx module?

For the same reasons as there is jkd8 module with

CompletableFuture

. For interop in large project which you cannot just rewrite all to coroutines

@elizarov so its possible to encode the Rx stream with coroutines? I only saw the singles in the experimental library

How about stuff like switchMap

It is possible. Rx module is just a trivial sample now. It will be expanded in the future. The are stream-production examples (with support for iteration with

for

loops) in the design document I've linked to

And jdk8 won't arrive on Android soon

You don't need jdk8

I remember seeing a tutorial for coroutines somewhere on the web, but i can't seem to find it now

They are not released yet 🙂 But you can look and a draft guide for

kotlinx.coroutines

here: https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.coroutines/blob/master/coroutines-guide.md

thank you!