Isolates: Dart's Concurrency Model

What are Isolates?

Isolates are Dart's way of achieving true parallelism. Each isolate has its own memory and event loop.

Basic Isolate

import 'dart:isolate';

void heavyComputation(SendPort sendPort) {
  int sum = 0;
  for (int i = 0; i < 1000000000; i++) {
    sum += i;
  }
  sendPort.send(sum);
}

void main() async {
  ReceivePort receivePort = ReceivePort();
  
  await Isolate.spawn(heavyComputation, receivePort.sendPort);
  
  var result = await receivePort.first;
  print('Result: $result');
}

Compute Function

import 'package:flutter/foundation.dart';

int expensiveFunction(int value) {
  int result = 0;
  for (int i = 0; i < value; i++) {
    result += i;
  }
  return result;
}

void main() async {
  int result = await compute(expensiveFunction, 1000000);
  print('Result: $result');
}

Use Cases

• Heavy computations
• Image processing
• Data parsing
• Network operations

Next Steps

• Extension Methods
• Metadata
• Best Practices