Book Image

Learning Elixir

By : Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou
Book Image

Learning Elixir

By: Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou

Overview of this book

Elixir, based on Erlang’s virtual machine and ecosystem, makes it easier to achieve scalability, concurrency, fault tolerance, and high availability goals that are pursued by developers using any programming language or programming paradigm. Elixir is a modern programming language that utilizes the benefits offered by Erlang VM without really incorporating the complex syntaxes of Erlang. Learning to program using Elixir will teach many things that are very beneficial to programming as a craft, even if at the end of the day, the programmer isn't using Elixir. This book will teach you concepts and principles important to any complex, scalable, and resilient application. Mostly, applications are historically difficult to reason about, but using the concepts in this book, they will become easy and enjoyable. It will teach you the functional programing ropes, to enable them to create better and more scalable applications, and you will explore how Elixir can help you achieve new programming heights. You will also glean a firm understanding of basics of OTP and the available generic, provided functionality for creating resilient complex systems. Furthermore, you will learn the basics of metaprogramming: modifying and extending Elixir to suite your needs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Elixir
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 6. Concurrent Programming – Using Processes to Conquer Concurrency

We have gone through most of the basic syntax of Elixir; we covered modules, functions, types, branching, recursion, and pattern matching. If that's all there was, we would be done. We would know enough of the language to be able to do most things, although, not very elegantly, but we would be finished. However, there is another world emerging, and it has been emerging for some time now—concurrent processing.

Chip manufacturers are no longer focusing on how frequent we can make a chip cycle (hertz, now measured on the Giga scale), they are more interested in how many cores we can put onto a chip. Dual core chips weren't common 12 years ago, but now, we are looking at machines with 4, 8, and even 12 cores, being common among desktops and laptops. These core counts were usually only available in high-end servers, but are now the norm, even for phones!

But this is where our problem as developers appears—current languages...