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Learning Elixir

Learning Elixir

By : Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou
5 (1)
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Learning Elixir

Learning Elixir

5 (1)
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 (11 chapters)
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10
Index

Erlang processes and OS processes


When discussing processes in the context of Erlang, we are usually referring to Erlang processes and not OS processes. There is a subtle but very important distinction between the two. OS processes are scheduled and controlled by, well, the operating system, or more correctly, the kernel. The kernel is tasked with queuing, dequeuing, marshalling data, memory allocation, and many other tasks required for smooth process execution. Erlang processes, on the other hand, are processes local to the Erlang VM (BEAM). ERTS is the proverbial kernel in this regard. It is in charge of the scheduling and management of these processes.

Another important distinction between these two is a question of weight. Typically, when thinking of OS processes, these are heavy, clunky objects to deal with, and forget about inter-process communication. Erlang processes are, in contrast, extremely lightweight. In fact, it is not uncommon for a single Erlang VM to have many thousands...

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