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

Parallel computation and concurrent computation


These two concepts are often confounded and otherwise used interchangeably (this book even does it!). But this is a mistake; they are different, although subtly, but it is an important distinction.

I'll use the word context to talk about threads or processes. These are, obviously, not the same thing, but they do share in concept with respect to parallel versus concurrent.

Parallel processing is simply the execution of two or more contexts simultaneously. Visually, this may look similar to the following diagram:

The contexts are executing at the same time, there is no switching or other interruptions between the execution.

Concurrent processing is subtly different. It can appear to be parallel, and in fact, be parallel, but there is no guarantee that it actually is parallel. For example, two contexts could be attempting to execute, but contend the CPU. The scheduler is then executing between the two, based on some criterion (cache miss, deadline...