Project Loom vs Kotlin Coroutines - Urs Peter @ Kotlin Dev Day Amsterdam 2021

Project Loom will be a game-changer for the JVM’s concurrency model, delivering ‘reactive’ characteristics out-of-the-box without the need for complex concurrency abstractions. What project Loom tries to achieve is already available in Kotlin through Coroutines. So the nagging question is: What will be the faith of Coroutines once Loom delivers? Will they become obsolete?

In this talk, I will try to answer this question. We will first recap how Coroutines work and what they offer us, explaining the underlying concepts such as structured concurrency, suspend methods, Continuations, etc. We will then look at how project Loom tries to achieve lightweight concurrency and compare it to Coroutines using many live-coded examples. Disclaimer: Loom is not final yet, and things still can/will change, even though Loom’s central philosophy and approach have been stable so far.

At the end of the talk, you will gain a good understanding of what lays ahead of us and what the impact of Loom on Kotlin’s Coroutines will be. Will their raison d’être still hold? Or might Loom even be a blessing in disguise?

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[MrGarkin]

Kotlin Coroutines are still usefull for Native/JS/Android compilation targets.
Dropping Red/Blue and making all functions red may be means losing semantics. There still will be VirtualThreads friendly and unfriendly functions, caused by external dependencies and VirtualThreads performance pitfalls.
If there would be real world performance benefits its possible we will see VirtualThreads coroutine executors and Loom targeted coroutine compiler.

[guai]

how can you call loom non-intrusive? you still have to write all that code dealing with virtual threads and your business logic still will be buried somewhere underneath.
koroutines are kinda intrusive, but in a standard way which you would have to grok once.

[AnonimoslawAnonimowy]

Who edited this video! The miniature on the left bottom is obstructing view! (minute 35)