Today’s Kotlin library article is about the kotlin.concurrent package, and everything that adds to the platform.

Java’s concurrency package is already quite sophisticated, and rather than re-invent so many extremely delicate abstractions, the Kotlin authors focused on making the libraries better suited to the language by decorating and shortening various features.

Article Series

Kotlin Libraries: I/O operations
Kotlin Libraries: Comparables and Comparators
Kotlin Libraries: Concurrency

Thread Local additions #

Thread local gets a new “get-or-set” defaulting function. This allows for an arbitrarily complex block of code to be used to default the thread local.

This is complementary to the ``

fun main(args: Array<String>) {
    val tlocal = ThreadLocal<String>()
    println(tlocal.getOrSet(::loadLocal)) // prints "initial-value"
    tlocal.set("updated-value")
    println(tlocal.getOrSet(::loadLocal)) // prints "updated-value"
}

// Could be anything
fun loadLocal() = "initial-value"

Locks #

Next on the hit list is lock management. In Java it’s common to write this:

ReentrantLock lock = new ReentrantLock();
lock.lock();
try {
  threadUnsafe();
} finally {
  lock.unlock();
}

This of course opens the opportunity to forget to call unlock or to write this boilerplate pattern in the wrong way. For example, you can write it this way which is not handled well by some counting lock implementations if the lock acquisition fails:

try {
  lock.lock(); // might fail!
  threadUnsafe();
} finally {
  lock.unlock();
}

Kotlin adds a withLock function for this purpose:

fun main(args: Array<String>) {
    val lock = ReentrantLock()
    lock.withLock {
        threadUnsafe()
    }
}

Two immediate benefits:

This is added to Lock interface, which means all lock implementations can take advantage of it
It is an inline function so you don’t pay for any additional overhead from the standard Java implementation.

They have done this similarly for ReentrantReadWriteLock readers and writers:

  val lock = ReentrantReadWriteLock()

  lock.read {
      readerFunction()
  }

  lock.write {
      writerFunction()
  }

Again, these are inlined so you don’t actually pay any additional dispatch cost for the cleanliness.

Quick and Dirty Threading #

In Java if you just want to spin off a singular thread to do some work, it probably looks like this:

Thread t = new Thread(() -> doSomeWork(), "worker-thread");
t.start();

Kotlin has a convenience function to create a thread that, by default, automactically starts the thread (and has named parameters for a variety of other fields, including the name):

val t = thread(name="worker-thread") = doSomeWork()
// already running here.

Timers #

Similarly, they have factory functions for timers, as well. They predominantly exist to cope with the fact TimerTask is an abstract class, and as such cannot be traditionally converted into a lambda.

There are a series of global factory functions that auto schedule the timer:

val t1 = timer(name = "timer-1", initialDelay = 0, period = 1000) { println("fixed delay after initial delay") }
val t2 = timer(name = "timer-2", startAt = Date.from(Instant.now()), period = 1000) { println("fixed delay after initial start time") }
val t3 = fixedRateTimer(name = "fixed-rate-1", initialDelay = 0, period = 1000) { println("fixed rate after initial delay") }
val t4 = fixedRateTimer(name ="fixed-rate-2", startAt = Date.from(Instant.now()), period = 1000) { println("fixed rate after initial delay") }

Finally, there are also extension methods added to the timer to schedule with lambdas as well:

val t5 = Timer("timer-3")
t5.schedule(delay = 1000) { println("run once after delay") }
val t6 = Timer("timer-4")
t6.schedule(delay = 1000, period = 1000) { println("fixed delay after initial delay") }
val t7 = Timer("timer-5")
t7.schedule(time = Date.from(Instant.now()), period = 1000) { println("fixed delay after initial start time") }
val t8 = Timer("fixed-rate-3")
t8.scheduleAtFixedRate(delay = 0, period = 1000) { println("fixed rate after initial delay") }
val t9 = Timer("fixed-rate-4")
t9.scheduleAtFixedRate(time = Date.from(Instant.now()), period = 1000) { println("fixed rate after initial start time") }