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

Summary


This was a big chapter and we covered a lot of material. We started our discussion around the importance of concurrency constructs to be available in our languages to better utilize the current processors in the market and then we started deep into the process structure of the runtime and how we can use Elixir to create processes. We covered parallel computation versus concurrent computation, Erlang processes versus OS processes, actor-model, sending and receiving messages in Elixir, and spawning, linking, and monitoring processes in Elixir.

Finally, we covered a number of examples that use Elixir processes.

There's a lot of interesting things we can do with Erlang/Elixir processes and the concurrency they enable. However, there are a lot of disadvantages of using them in their raw form. As you might have noticed, we have duplicated a lot of work throughout the examples. We wrote a lot of similar functions for spawning the processes, the receive loops, message delivery failure, and...