Dart Concurrency Complete Guide - Isolates, compute, Streams, and Mutex Patterns

This article provides a comprehensive guide on how to handle background tasks in Flutter applications, ensuring that the main thread remains responsive and efficient. Here are some key takeaways:

Key Concepts

1. Concurrency Patterns:

   • Use compute() for one-shot CPU-intensive tasks.
   • Employ Isolate.spawn() for long-running background workers.
   • Utilize TransferableTypedData for large buffer transfers without copying data.

2. Reactive Data Pipelines:

   • Leverage the Stream class along with asyncMap to create efficient and responsive reactive pipelines.

3. Synchronization:

   • Use the synchronized package (specifically, Lock) to serialize concurrent asynchronous code execution.

Practical Examples

1. Resize an Image in a Background Isolate:

   dart
    
   1Future<Uint8List> resizeImageInBackground(Uint8List original) {
   2  return compute(_resizeImage, original);
   3}
   4
   5Uint8List _resizeImage(Uint8List bytes) {
   6  final decoded = img.decodeImage(bytes)!;
   7  final resized = img.copyResize(decoded, width: 400);
   8  return Uint8List.fromList(img.encode

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