kotlin - Unnecessarily mark functions as suspending in favor of common abstraction

Question

I'm working on a project with an API running in the JVM and a JS client to access this API from the browser. The data classes of those objects which are converted to/from JSON are in a multiplatform module so that I can reuse the code on both platforms and don't accidentally end up with mismatched attributes. At this point it would be nice to also have the APIs interface in this mutliplatform module which then would be implemented and hosted in the JVM and implemented and presented in the browser. However, all methods of this interface need to be suspending in the browser since requests are (at least with Ktor's client, which I'm using) while they do not need to be suspending in the JVM.

Is there a good reason against having all those methods suspending even though I don't make use of it in the JVM? I know that methods usually should be suspending only if it's actually needed, but then I would be writing all the same interfaces (besides the suspend keyword) twice which seems like a lot of unnecessary boilerplate code to me. The methods which would unnecessarily be marked as suspending are called from suspending contexts (I'm using Ktor in the JVM too) so restricted usage wouldn't be a problem.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65852794/unnecessarily-mark-functions-as-suspending-in-favor-of-common-abstraction

Answer 1

This seems like a matter of preference, really. Both using suspend and not using it have disadvantges, so you have to choose which weigh less.

From what you write, it seems that the advantages of using suspend (write code only once) outweigh the disavantage of polluting the interface with an unnecessary modifier. I am not aware of the possible runtime overheads here. Personally, I would opt to go with suspend.