What are use-cases for a coroutine?

Question

The concept of a coroutine sounds very interesting, but I don\'t know, if it makes sense in a real productive environment? What are use-cases for coroutines, that can be solved

Answer 1

True coroutines require support from your tooling - they need to be implemented by the compiler and supported by the underlying framework.

One real world example of Coroutines is found with the "yield return" keyword provided in C# 2.0, which allows you to write a method that returns multiple values for looping.

The "yield return" does have limitations, however - the implementation uses a helper class to capture state, and it only supports a specific case of coroutine as generator (iterator).

In the more general case, the advantage of Coroutines is that they make certain state based computations much easier to express and easier to understand - implementing a state machine as a set of coroutines can be more elegant than more common approaches. But, doing this requires support and tooling that doesn't yet exist in C# or Java.