I have a Kotlin library that I'm attempting to call from Java. I haven't worked with Kotlin before.
The Kotlin library function is as follows:
suspend fun decode(jwt: String): UsefulThing {
// does a bunch of stuff, removed for brevity.
return otherthing.getUsefulThing(jwt)
}
How can I call this from Java? So far I've tried:
Continuation<UsefulThing> continuation = new Continuation<>() {
@NotNull
@Override
public CoroutineContext getContext() {
return EmptyCoroutineContext.INSTANCE;
}
@Override
public void resumeWith(@NotNull Object o) {
System.out.println("Result of decode is " + o);
}
};
// Call decode with the parameter and continuation.
Object result = UsefulThingKt.decode(JWT, continuation);
// result is COROUTINE_SUSPENDED
I never see any console output. Looks like the continuation is never called, or it's run in another context. I've pored over other answers and coroutines seem to have gone through a number of iterations - I can't find an explanation that really makes sense to me.
I should note that I'm running on Java 11.
How can I simply call the kotlin function?
I suggest to not even try. Suspend functions were never meant for Java interop.
Instead, convert it on the Kotlin side to something that Java understands - to CompletableFuture:
fun decodeAsync(jwt: String): CompletableFuture<UsefulThing> = GlobalScope.future { decode(jwt) }
We can freely mix Java and Kotlin code in a single module, so you can create such wrapper inside your project.
Depending on your case you could use GlobalScope (in Java we don't have structured concurrency) or you could create a custom CoroutineScope and handle its lifecycle manually.