I am writing code that is able to scan for devices. As soon as they show up, a collection is automatically populated. (I do not mean “collection” specifically as in “Kotlin standard collection classes”. I am referring to a collection as a design concept.) I start a scan, and as soon as a device is found, an object is added to the collection, and this object represents the newly found device. If the device goes away, then it is automatically removed from the collection. If other pieces of code accessed the collection and got a reference to such an object, then the object remains usable, but in a “zombie” state, where all IO calls fail. (This fixes a race condition when a device goes away while some other coroutine or thread is using the object.)
I now wonder how to do this in the most Kotlin-esque way. I want to use coroutines.
One way would be a SharedFlow that is associated with the collection and which announces that object X was added or removed. So, something like SharedFlow<Pair<DeviceObject, Boolean>>
where the boolean is true if the associated object was added and false if it was removed. (In production code, this would be a dedicated class instead of a Pair, and an enum class instead of the boolean.) But perhaps there are better ways to do this? Or does something in the standard library or in a mature third party library exist for such “live” collections?