Channels

Channels are a fundamental tool in Kotlin for communication between coroutines, offering a safe and efficient way to transfer streams of values between different pieces of asynchronous code.

Strictly speaking, we can say that the definition of a channel is a flow of data that is sent and received between different coroutines. We could define it in a simpler way, as a means by which coroutines can communicate.

Types of channels

We will start by describing the types of channels. For our examples, we will use the context of a delivery app.

Buffered channels

Buffered channels allow data to be temporarily stored in a buffer, decoupling the producer from the consumer. The buffer size is defined when the channel is created, allowing the producer to send multiple items without blocking, as long as the buffer is not full. The consumer, on the other hand, can process data at its own pace, drawing from the buffer as long as items are available, facilitating asynchronous...