[Help] What is the difference between Source and RawSource?

[masterQian]

What is the difference between Source and RawSource?
There is no document to tell me, it's too obscure and difficult to understand.
When I use SystemFileSystem, I get RawSource, but when I get and process byte arrays, only Source has a read method.
If I need to provide an input source, should the parameter passed during the function call be RawSource or Source?
which step does the time-consuming data reading occur? Where should I use withContext to switch coroutines to IO Dispatcher?
At the step where SystemFileSystem retrieves RawSource?
At it happen at the RawSource.buffered() ?
At the Source.readByteArray()?

Thanks !!!!!

[fzhinkin]

@masterQian, Source is a buffered version of RawSource, you can check the documentation, the differences are elaborated there:

• kotlinx-io-core overview
• RawSource docs
• Source docs

Please let me know if you think there are parts of these docs that are not clear and should be improved to better elaborate the difference and use-cases.

The actual IO won't happen until you read something from Source, so in terms of blocking, it makes sense to schedule Source.readByteArray() call into a separate coroutine. However, note that primitives provided by the library are not thread-safe, so proper synchronization will be required if you decide to use the source concurrently.

[masterQian]

@fzhinkin Thank you very much for your answer!