Kotlin Std Coroutines & Arrow Computation blocks

Arrow computation blocks are built on top of Kotlin Std’s Coroutines intrinsics and don’t depend on the KotlinX Coroutines library. Computation blocks support cancellation automatically observing [CancellationException],(https://kotlinlang.org/api/latest/jvm/stdlib/kotlin.coroutines.cancellation/-cancellation-exception/) available in the Kotlin Standard Library.

Let’s take a deeper look at what we can find in the Kotlin Std Coroutines package.

Demystify Coroutine

Kotlin’s standard library defines a Coroutine as an instance of a suspendable computation.

In other words, a Coroutine is a compiled suspend () -> A program wired to a Continuation.

Which can be created by using kotlin.coroutines.intrinsics.createCoroutineUnintercepted.

So let’s take a quick look at an example.

import kotlin.coroutines.intrinsics.createCoroutineUnintercepted
import kotlin.coroutines.Continuation
import kotlin.coroutines.EmptyCoroutineContext
import kotlin.coroutines.resume

suspend fun one(): Int = 1

val cont: Continuation<Unit> = ::one
  .createCoroutineUnintercepted(Continuation(EmptyCoroutineContext, ::println))

cont.resume(Unit)

As you can see here above we create a Coroutine using createCoroutineUnintercepted which returns us Continuation<Unit>. Strange, you might’ve expected a Coroutine type but a Coroutine in the type system is represented by Continuation<Unit>.

This typealias Coroutine = Contination<Unit> will start running every time you call resume(Unit), which allows you to run the suspend program as many times as you want.

Kotlin Standard Library Coroutines

The standard library offers a powerful set of primitives to build powerful applications on top of Continuations, together with the compiler’s ability to rewrite continuation based code to a beautiful suspend syntax.

They can be used to implement a very wide range use-cases, and or not bound to asynchronous -or concurrency use-cases.

Arrow Core, offers computational DSLs build on top of Kotlin’s Coroutines either { }, effect { }, eagerEffect { }, etc.
DeepRecursiveFunction explained here
Semantics of Structured Concurrency and Effect

The above image is not exhaustive list of the primitives you can find in the standard library. For an exhaustive list check the Kotlin Standard Library API docs: