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Mastering Elixir

You're reading from   Mastering Elixir Build and scale concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant applications

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jul 2018
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781788472678
Length 574 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Authors (2):
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André Albuquerque André Albuquerque
Author Profile Icon André Albuquerque
André Albuquerque
Daniel Caixinha Daniel Caixinha
Author Profile Icon Daniel Caixinha
Daniel Caixinha
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Table of Contents (13) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Preparing for the Journey Ahead 2. Innards of an Elixir Project FREE CHAPTER 3. Processes – The Bedrock of Concurrency and Fault Tolerance 4. Powered by Erlang/OTP 5. Demand-Driven Processing 6. Metaprogramming – Code That Writes Itself 7. Persisting Data Using Ecto 8. Phoenix – A Flying Web Framework 9. Finding Zen through Testing 10. Deploying to the Cloud 11. Keeping an Eye on Your Processes 12. Other Books You May Enjoy

Task

As we saw earlier, processes are cheap to spawn in Elixir because we are always in the realm of the BEAM. This is the perfect setup for us to spawn a process whenever we need. If you need to do something in parallel, you can spawn a process. If you need to do many things in parallel, you can spawn many processes. The virtual machine won't break a sweat and you will have an army of processes in no time to accomplish whatever you need.

However, process communication is laborious, so if you need results from those parallel computations, you will have to receive the results via message passing and eventually terminate the processes afterwards.

In this situation, we can resort to the Task module, using its Task.async/1 function to spawn tasks, and then use Task.await/1 when you need the results from the tasks you previously spawned.

Imagine that we want...

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