The language and standard libraries make it super convenient to create coroutines, and the Kotlin runtime scheduling hides the complexities of managing concurrent coroutines. Each coroutine prints a dot character after five seconds. The highlighted code will be executed in coroutines. This example created 100K coroutines with a few lines of code. The example below comes from Kotlin’s official tutorial. Compared to a Java thread, a Kotlin coroutine has a smaller memory footprint and lower overhead in context-switching. Coroutines, according to Wikipedia, are “computer program components that generalize subroutines for non-preemptive multitasking, by allowing execution to be suspended and resumed.“ Kotlin’s native language and runtime support for coroutines allows easy asynchronous programming when building high performance applications. The guide also helps illustrate programming with coroutines in general. We will discuss what coroutines are, get an overview of language, library and scheduling components of Kotlin coroutines, and then deep dive into these components.

We created this guide to help engineers understand how coroutines work in Kotlin, as compared to Java threading. It's typically considered a frontend language, but it also allows implementing robust and high performance backend services. While Kotlin’s benefits include a rich ecosystem, interoperability with Java, and developer friendliness, many engineers are unfamiliar with using Kotlin in backend development. Kotlin coroutines were an area our engineering teams needed to quickly understand. During our own migration, we opted to base our new backend architecture on Kotlin, shifting away from Python. When moving from a monolith to a microservices architecture, engineering teams often need to master a new programming paradigm.

Kotlin internal function