Programming Elixir ≥ 1.6

Agents—A Teaser

Our Fibonacci code is really inefficient. To calculate fib(5), we calculate this:

fib(5)
=  fib(4)                                     + fib(3)
=  fib(3)                   + fib(2)          + fib(2)          + fib(1)
=  fib(2)          + fib(1) + fib(1) + fib(0) + fib(1) + fib(0) + fib(1)
=  fib(1) + fib(0) + fib(1) + fib(1) + fib(0) + fib(1) + fib(0) + fib(1)

Look at all that duplication. If only we could cache the intermediate values.

As you know, Elixir modules are basically buckets of functions—they cannot hold state. But processes can hold state. And Elixir comes with a library module called Agent that makes it easy to wrap a process containing state in a nice module interface. Don’t worry about the details of the code that follows—we cover agents and tasks. For now, just see how processes are among ...