Problem Statement
What is Flow in Kotlin Coroutines?
Explanation
Flow is a cold stream that emits values asynchronously and sequentially, only starting execution when collected, making it perfect for representing streams of data like database queries or network responses. Unlike hot streams that emit regardless of subscribers, Flow only executes when someone collects it.
Flow provides operators like map, filter, and transform similar to collection operations but for async streams, and it handles backpressure automatically by suspending emission when the collector is slow. Flow is built on coroutines using suspend functions.
Use Flow for asynchronous data streams that should be processed one at a time, like reading files, making sequential API calls, or observing database changes, providing a reactive programming model integrated with Kotlin coroutines.
