Learning Concurrency in Kotlin

Race conditions

Race conditions, perhaps the most common error when writing concurrent code, happen when concurrent code is written but is expected to behave like sequential code. In more practical terms, it means that there is an assumption that concurrent code will always execute in a particular order.

For example, let's say that you are writing a function that has to concurrently fetch something from a database and call a web service. Then it has to do some computation once both operations are completed. It would be a common mistake to assume that going to the database will be faster, so many people may try to access the result of the database operation as soon as the web service operation is done, thinking that by that time the information ...