Programming Elixir ≥ 1.6

A Simple Process

Here’s a module that defines a function we’d like to run as a separate process:

spawn/spawn-basic.ex

defmodule SpawnBasic do
  def greet do
    IO.puts "Hello"
  end
end

Yup, that’s it. There’s nothing special—it’s just regular code.

Let’s fire up IEx and play:

iex> c("spawn-basic.ex")
[SpawnBasic]

First let’s call it as a regular function:

iex> SpawnBasic.greet
Hello
:ok

Now let’s run it in a separate process:

iex> spawn(SpawnBasic, :greet, [])
Hello
#PID<0.42.0>

The spawn function kicks off a new process. It comes in many forms, but the two simplest ones let you run an anonymous function and run a named function in a module, passing a list of arguments. (We used the latter here.)

The