Mastering Kotlin

Suspending functions

Coroutines in Kotlin include the notion of suspending functions. Suspending functions are denoted by adding the suspend modifier to a function definition. There are two key things to remember regarding suspending functions:

• They can be called from within a coroutine in the same way as a regular function.
• They can call other suspending functions.

If we return to our working example, we can see an example of the suspend function, delay():

fun main() {    GlobalScope.launch {        delay(500) // simulate network request        println("Coroutines")    }    println("Hello")    Thread.sleep(1000)}

delay() is a suspending function that will suspend the current coroutine for a specified amount of time. Suspending functions is the primary mechanism ...