Programming Elixir ≥ 1.6

Introduction to Duper

I have loads of duplicate files littering my computers. In an effort to tame this, let’s write a duplicate-file finder. Well call it Duper (so we can later create a paid version called SuperDuper). It’ll work by scanning all the files in a directory tree, calculating a hash for each. If two files have the same hash, we’ll report them as duplicates.

Let’s start asking the questions.

Q1: What is the environment and what are its constraints?

We’re going to run this on a typical computer. It’ll have roughly two orders of magnitude more file storage than main memory. Files will range in size from 10⁰ to 10¹⁰ bytes, and there will be roughly 10⁷ of them.

What this means:

We need to allow for the fact that although we have to load ...