Programming Elixir ≥ 1.6

Chapter 15Working with Multiple Processes

One of Elixir’s key features is the idea of packaging code into small chunks that can be run independently and concurrently.

If you’ve come from a conventional programming language, this may worry you. Concurrent programming is “known” to be difficult, and there’s a performance penalty to pay when you create lots of processes.

Elixir doesn’t have these issues, thanks to the architecture of the Erlang VM on which it runs.

Elixir uses the actor model of concurrency. An actor is an independent process that shares nothing with any other process. You can spawn new processes, send them messages, and receive messages back. And that’s it (apart from some details about error handling and monitoring, which we ...