So what are the current thoughts around threading The concur

Question

So what are the current thoughts around threading The concurrency sample passes messages back and fourth but once this is implemented in Kotlin what will the limitations be that constitute a message I e if I have an immutable object of my own design will I be able to return that from a thread as a result

olonho · Answer

As long as it could be serialized and deserialized yes or if it big data in C heap and ownership is controlled by your own proto

spierce7 · Answer

Oh really passing data between threads will require serialization and deserialization That s one of the biggest pain points around using Dart isolates

spierce7 · Answer

It makes it VERY difficult working with large data sets that require large amounts of serialization and deserialization Not to mention it s VERY painful There won t be any way to return an immutable object between threads

olonho · Answer

this area need to be further designed and we hope that we can build an API around coroutines and workers where object passing will be both nice and lightweight So stay tuned I ve only described options available immediately

spierce7 · Answer

oh I see slightly smiling face

mikehearn · Answer

out of interest why does Kotlin Native not support ordinary threading

mikehearn · Answer

that seems like a surprising design choice given that Kotlin JVM is rather un opinionated when it comes to controversial topics and generally lets people go their own way

olonho · Answer

It s not a question of threading it s question if shared object heap Being JVM developer for quite a few years I find that shared object heap gives lots of complexity with very dubious benefits

olonho · Answer

And if one absolutely needs that Kotlin JVM could always be used

mikehearn · Answer

I d say that s a rather strong view Visual Basic pre NET worked the way you describe It was universally considered a problem rather than a solution In practice because shared state is often mandatory for any given problem and thus you end up wanting to do a lot of messages and then you want to simplify the process with some sort of RPC hence VB used DCOM to let threads communicate and then that opens you up to re entrancy issues other kinds of deadlock and so on

mikehearn · Answer

More to the point what is the target market for Kotlin Native I thought it was similar to the target market for C++ So people will want to exploit the hardware maximally

mikehearn · Answer

A change as basic as no multi threading because shared memory is what defines threading vs just processes will essentially mean Kotlin Native is a different language from Kotlin JVM and much software simply won t work on both

olonho · Answer

Nobody says no shared memory as you may notice the only thing being said no shared object heap

olonho · Answer

The most popular language in the Universe yes JavaScript lives just fine without shared object heap and it doesn t prevent development of very complex and efficient applications such as Google Maps or GMail