CoroutineWorker

Specs

Supported on Native and JVM (feel free to contribute adding more targets)
Kotlin 1.3.50

Gradle

To use in your multiplatform project, update your common dependencies in your gradle configuration:

kotlin {
    sourceSets {
        commonMain {
            dependencies {
                implementation "com.autodesk:coroutineworker:0.3.0"
            }
        }
    }
}

CoroutineWorker uses gradle module metadata. We recommend adding the following to your settings.gradle to take advantage of that:

enableFeaturePreview('GRADLE_METADATA')

About

CoroutineWorker helps support multi-threaded coroutine usage in common code that works in Kotlin/Native and on JVM until kotlinx.coroutines has full support for native, multi-threaded coroutines.

Sample Usage

Spawning Asynchronous Work

Use execute to start background work from common code:

val worker = CoroutineWorker.execute {
  // - In here, `this` is a `CoroutineScope`
  // - Run suspend functions, call launch, etc.
  // - This code runs in a thread pool
}

// Tells the worker to cancel (uses standard coroutine cancellation)
worker.cancel()

// Tells the worker to cancel; it suspends until cancellation is finished
worker.cancelAndJoin()

Waiting on Asynchronous Work to Complete

From a coroutine context (i.e. somewhere you can call a suspend fun), use withContext to kick off work to another thread. It will non-blocking/suspend wait for the cross-thread work to complete:

suspend fun doWork() {
  val result = CoroutineWorker.withContext {
    // This is similar to execute, but it returns
    // the result of the work at the end of this lambda
    1
  }
  print(result) // prints 1
}

This is like using withContext on JVM to switch coroutine contexts. You can also properly pass a dispatcher, which will be used on JVM: withContext(Dispatchers.IO) { … }. The idea here is that this will be easy to migrate when we do get multi-threaded coroutine support in Kotlin/Native.

Waiting on Asynchronous Callback-based Work

Use threadSafeSuspendCallback to bridge callback-style async work into your code as a suspend fun:

suspend fun performNetworkFetch() {
  val result = threadSafeSuspendCallback { completion ->
    // example: fetch network data that isn't coroutine-compatible
    fetchNetworkData { networkResult ->
      // notify that async work is complete
      completion(networkRestul)
    }
  }

  // result is now available here
}