Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks

Day 1: Messages and Mailboxes

Today we’ll see how to create and stop processes, send and receive messages, and detect when a process has terminated.

Joe asks:

Actor or Process?

In Erlang, and therefore Elixir, an actor is called a process. In most environments a process is a heavyweight entity that consumes lots of resources and is expensive to create. An Elixir process, by contrast, is very lightweight—lighter weight even than most systems’ threads, both in terms of resource consumption and startup cost. Elixir programs typically create thousands of processes without problems and don’t normally need to resort to the equivalent of thread ...