Coroutines and RxJava an Asynchronicity Comparison (Part 5): Operators

Common OperatorsSome RxJava operators are available in the Kotlin standard library as part of Kotlin Collections. Here you can see a table comparing simple operators.These operators transform the stream in the same way even though some operators differ in name: e.

g. skip in RxJava is called drop in Coroutines.Create Your Own OperatorSome operators are not part of Kotlin Collections. However, you can create them yourself with little effort.

We can replicate what the range RxJava operator does with few lines of code and a simple for loop.fun range( context: CoroutineContext, start: Int, count: Int) publish(context) for (x in start until start count) send(x)Some other operators require more work. In the example below you can see the implementation of the Completable.

zip RxJava operator which takes two blocks of code and waits for both of them to finish.suspend fun zip( context: CoroutineContext, block: () -> Unit, block2: () -> Unit) val deferred1 async(context) block() val deferred2 async(context) block2() deferred1.await() deferred2.await()If you noticed, we pass a CoroutineContext as a parameter. We do that so we can cancel the operator easily by calling .cancel() on that contexts Job as we talked about in Part 2.Complex OperatorsWhat about even more complex RxJava operators like debounce?You can find debounce as an extension function on ReceiveChannel. RxJava timeout has an equivalent in Kotlin Coroutines with withTimeoutOrNull, etc.Similarities and DifferencesWe see that most operators are available in both libraries and if not, you can easily build them.The only difference I can see in these two libraries is at which point you apply those operatorsWhereas in RxJava you can apply operators before subscribing to the stream, you have to do it after opening a subscription in Coroutines. Lets see how we map an element in RxJava:rxObservable .map result -> map(result) .subscribe( consumeResult(it) )And now how we do it in Coroutines:broadcastChannel .openSubscription() .map result -> map(result) In Coroutines we have to do it after opening a subscription because map in Coroutines is an extension function on ReceiveChannel. This is the case for other operators such as filter, drop, etc. Calling openSubscription() returns a SubscriptionReceiveChannel object which extends ReceiveChannel.In my opinion, Coroutines requires extra work if you want multiple Observers to apply the same operators. Of course you can do it! But it requires more code.Whats Coming Next?Threading is the topic for the sixth part of this series.If you want to know how you can swap threading in Coroutines the same way you do it in RxJava with subscribeOn() and observeOn(), dont miss next weeks blog post!More educationMore articles about RxJavaRxJava: Android MVVM App structure with RetrofitIntroductionmedium.

comRxJava 2: Android MVVM Lifecycle App Structure with Retrofit 2Its been more than two years since I wrote about MVVM, RxJava and Retrofit. Lets do an update.medium.comThanks for reading,Manuel Vicente Vivo