in case you are not aware, this has been discussed before on other issues on this repository, you might want to check the history. SharedFlow is very powerful and flexible, I only ever use StateFlow if it fits very well the use case, and if I don't have a natural initial value, then it does not fit the use case. I myself usually prefer just using SharedFlow configured similarly to a StateFlow. Have you considered wrapping every value in a 'Resource' sealed class? Then all your StateFlow lacking a proper initial value could be constructed with Resource.Empty instead of null, if you are so averse to null :).

value access in a try catch of some kind. Basically we would never be sure anymore if accessing a StateFlow value would be safe, and we would need to wrap every. value access raise an exception can cause so much unexpected errors in user code. I understand your points and I can say I also missed the no-initial-value StateFlow.īut I also think that your suggestion of making. There are many cases where an object cannot really have a default 'empty' implementation, and having to make the T in StateFlow type nullable in order to support lazy initialization of objects might also introduce some bad consequences to the code base.Ĭould we rather have a default MutableStateFlow() constructor, combined with throwing an exception if stateFlow.value is accessed without having any value? This maybe belongs to the fail-safe vs fail-fast topic, but I really wish we did not have to make the T type nullable.

To migrate ConflatedBroadcastChannel usage to StateFlow, start by replacing usages of the ConflatedBroadcastChannel() constructor with MutableStateFlow(initialValue), using null as an initial value if you don’t have one. Can we have a way of initializing a MutableStateFlow without having to use an initial value for it?Ĭonceptually, state flow is similar to ConflatedBroadcastChannel and is designed to completely replace ConflatedBroadcastChannel in the future.

Empty mutable list kotlin