I'd love to get some clarification or thoughts fro...

# language-evolution

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

I'd love to get some clarification or thoughts from someone in the Kotlin team who worked on Coroutines' design about this: https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/coroutine-vs-job/22049/13 since tbh I'm starting to doubt everything I know about Coroutines now lol!

[gildor]

Thoughts about what? Looks as quite pointless bike-shedding about terms

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

It's more about what the definition of a coroutine really is? Like is it simply a continuation, or is it a more abstract term? There's multiple design questions in the thread, and so a Kotlin team response would help reduce some ambiguity

[gildor]

It’s an abstract term which has particular implementation in the language

[gildor]

I just want to point out that original question is pretty simple “Why does the library include an extra Job abstraction (e.g “a handle”) for tracking the lifecycle of a Coroutine”, but then discussion goes to some strange direction

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

Well and then what exactly is the implementation is the language? Yes the first question is no longer the issue here. I'm just curious about what exactly is equivalent to a coroutine in the language.

[gildor]

There are many parts of implementation

[gildor]

Continuation is essentially a step of coroutines state machine

[gildor]

Coroutines KEEP has details about implementation details
https://github.com/Kotlin/KEEP/blob/master/proposals/coroutines.md#implementation-details

[ephemient]

also https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/document-coroutines-codegen/compiler/backend/src/org/jetbrains/kotlin/codegen/coroutines/coroutines-codegen.md

[ephemient]

but that's really not what you want to be thinking about, most of the time

[ephemient]

kotlin compiler and stdlib kotlin.coroutines provide some basic infrastructure for transforming linear code into state machines with CPS

[ephemient]

kotlinx.coroutines (the x is important) builds structured concurrency on top of that

[ephemient]

when you're working with "coroutines" you're almost certainly dealing with the kotlinx.coroutines abstractions