Learning Concurrency in Kotlin

Suspending functions in action

In Chapter 2, Coroutines in Action, we talked about whether it's more convenient to use async functions instead of using coroutine builders to implement concurrent code. Now it's time to expand this topic by adding suspending functions to the toolset. First, let's compare a simple implementation of a repository using an async function with the equivalent implementation using suspending functions.

As a reminder, we refer to async functions as functions that return an implementation of Job, including Deferred. Notice that those functions are commonly a function wrapped into a launch() or async() builder, but as long as an implementation of Job is returned, we will refer to them as async functions.