elixir Process

elixir Process

overview

Elixir’s processes should not be confused with operating system processes.

Elixir are extremely lightweight in terms of memory and CPU (even compared to threads as used in many other programming languages). Because of this, it is not uncommon to have tens or even hundreds of thousands of processes running simultaneously.

There are some articles that you should read them first.

• elixir-lang processes
• hexdocs elixir Process

Process

There is a process tool provided by erlang.

:observer.start

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Everything of elixir runs on processes and elixir doesn’t have variable.
How can we access a global data?

We can use a process to store data, and other process can access it.

Create a process

pid = spawn(fn -> 
  Process.sleep(10000)
  IO.inspect("hello world")
end)

# will be dead after 10000 ms
Process.alive?(pid)

Notice spawn/1 returns a PID (process identifier). At this point, the process you spawned is very likely dead. The spawned process will execute the given function and exit after the function is done:

It merely logged an error but the parent process is still running. That’s because processes are isolated. If we want the failure in one process to propagate to another one, we should link them. This can be done with spawn_link/1:

pid = spawn_link(fn -> raise "oops link" end)