Book Image

Mastering Elixir

By : André Albuquerque, Daniel Caixinha
Book Image

Mastering Elixir

By: André Albuquerque, Daniel Caixinha

Overview of this book

Running concurrent, fault-tolerant applications that scale is a very demanding responsibility. After learning the abstractions that Elixir gives us, developers are able to build such applications with inconceivable low effort. There is a big gap between playing around with Elixir and running it in production, serving live requests. This book will help you fll this gap by going into detail on several aspects of how Elixir works and showing concrete examples of how to apply the concepts learned to a fully ?edged application. In this book, you will learn how to build a rock-solid application, beginning by using Mix to create a new project. Then you will learn how the use of Erlang's OTP, along with the Elixir abstractions that run on top of it (such as GenServer and GenStage), that allow you to build applications that are easy to parallelize and distribute. You will also master supervisors (and supervision trees), and comprehend how they are the basis for building fault-tolerant applications. Then you will use Phoenix to create a web interface for your application. Upon fnishing implementation, you will learn how to take your application to the cloud, using Kubernetes to automatically deploy, scale, and manage it. Last, but not least, you will keep your peace of mind by learning how to thoroughly test and then monitor your application.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
5
Demand-Driven Processing
Index

Chapter 6. Metaprogramming – Code That Writes Itself

We will now analyze how we can develop code that writes code for us, before being finally transformed into BEAM bytecode. This will let us extend Elixir, inject new code into existing modules, and even write a domain-specific language to simplify our media pipeline definitions.

What you will see through this chapter is only possible due to the incredible tools Elixir gives us to manipulate the abstract syntax tree just before it is turned into bytecode. Let's jump right into it!

In this chapter, we'll cover the following:

  • What is an abstract syntax tree and how to access it?
  • Using the special forms quote/2 and unquote/1
  • Macro hygiene and the caller and macro contexts
  • Applying use and its __using__/1 function
  • Using module attributes to collect information about the caller module
  • Creating a domain-specific language with macros