What is a coroutine and why not call it a lightweight thread?

Sebastian and Márton chat with Marcin Moskała about coroutines.

Resources:

• Coroutines Mastery course
• Coroutines | Kotlin Documentation
• kotlinx.coroutines
• Taming Asynchronous Beasts | Marcin Moskała
• Coroutine Debugging in IntelliJ IDEA | Alexey Merkulov
• Lifecycles, Coroutines and Scopes | Alejandro Serrano Mena
• Collect Like a Pro | Manuel Vivo
• Untangling Coroutine Testing | Márton Braun
• JetBrains/lincheck – Concurrent testing framework
• #talking-kotlin on Kotlin Slack

Hosts:

• Sebastian Aigner – Website | Bluesky
• Márton Braun – Website | Bluesky

Guest:

• Marcin Moskała – kt.academy

Timeline:
(0:00) Introduction
(1:18) Branding discussion
(3:23) Handling preconceptions
(4:54) What are coroutines?
(7:17) Lightweight threads?
(11:07) Where coroutines live
(13:27) Sequence Builder Example
(17:37) The design of coroutines
(20:52) What Makes Coroutines special vs other languages?
(26:56) Coroutines vs Loom
(34:55) Easy to start, hard to master
(41:07) Common mistakes
(49:33) Flows
(58:52) Thinking about Flows
(1:02:41) Derailing the conversation
(1:03:55) Flows for single values
(1:12:27) Structured concurrency
(1:18:53) The 4 advantages
(1:24:40) Seb tries web dev / The web is broken?!
(1:31:15) collectAsStateWithLifecycle
(1:32:00) Gardening break
(1:36:23) Scopes and contexts
(1:43:22) Testing coroutines
(1:50:29) Lincheck
(1:51:32) Turbine
(1:55:05) Coroutines Mastery course
(2:01:43) Wrap-up