I am new to coroutines, I understand launch
and async
but still confusing part is Deferred
. What is Deferred
? and difference between Job
and Deferred
. Clear explanation and example is more helpful. Thanks in advance.
So job
is sort of an object that represents a coroutine's execution and is related to structured concurrency, e.g. you can cancel a job, and all the children of this job will be also cancelled.
From docs:
Job is a cancellable thing with a life-cycle that culminates in its completion.
Deferred
is some kind of analog of Future
in Java: in encapsulates an operation that will be finished at some point in future after it's initialization. But is also related to coroutines in Kotlin.
From documentation:
Deferred value is a non-blocking cancellable future — it is a Job that has a result.
So, Deferred
is a Job
that has a result:
A
deferred
value is aJob
. Ajob
in thecoroutineContext
ofasync
builder represents the coroutine itself.
An example:
someScope.launch {
val userJob: Deferred<User> = async(IO) { repository.getUser(id) }
//some operations, while user is being retrieved
val user = userJob.await() //here coroutine will be suspended for a while, and the method `await` is available only from `Deferred` interface
//do the job with retrieved user
}
Also, it is possible to structure this async
request with an existing scope, but that is a talk of another question.