Creating background processes

In Chapter 2, Intermediate Dart Programming, we saw the Dart approach to concurrent programming: isolates. With this, we can create independent workers that are similar to threads, but do not share memory and communicate with each other only via messages.

In mobile application context, we need to care about concurrency as well. As long operations may cause lag on rendering and so on, Flutter provides an easy way to spawn an isolate, the compute() function.

The Flutter compute() function

The compute() method is intended to be a facilitator for the task of spawning a new isolate, sending a message to it, and getting a response back. Its signature goes as follows:

Future<R> compute <Q, R...