What methods can be used to initiate coroutine execution in Kotlin?

In Kotlin, a coroutine can be initiated in several ways, depending on the context and requirements:

• launch — starts a new coroutine without blocking the current thread, returns a Job. Used for background tasks.

GlobalScope.launch {
    // code in coroutine
}

• async — starts a coroutine and returns a Deferred, which can be used to get the result asynchronously.

val deferred = GlobalScope.async {
    // computation
    42
}
val result = deferred.await()

• runBlocking — blocks the current thread until the coroutine completes, usually used in main or tests.

runBlocking {
    // code
}

• withContext — switches the execution context within a coroutine, for example, to another dispatcher.

withContext(Dispatchers.IO) {
    // input-output operation
}

The choice of method depends on whether you need to get a result, block the thread, or just run a task in the background.