Search icon CANCEL
Subscription
0
Cart icon
Your Cart (0 item)
Close icon
You have no products in your basket yet
Save more on your purchases now! discount-offer-chevron-icon
Savings automatically calculated. No voucher code required.
Arrow left icon
Explore Products
Best Sellers
New Releases
Books
Videos
Audiobooks
Learning Hub
Conferences
Free Learning
Arrow right icon
Arrow up icon
GO TO TOP
Mastering Elixir

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

Arrow left icon
Product type Paperback
Published in Jul 2018
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781788472678
Length 574 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
Tools
Arrow right icon
Authors (2):
Arrow left icon
André Albuquerque André Albuquerque
Author Profile Icon André Albuquerque
André Albuquerque
Daniel Caixinha Daniel Caixinha
Author Profile Icon Daniel Caixinha
Daniel Caixinha
Arrow right icon
View More author details
Toc

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...

lock icon The rest of the chapter is locked
Register for a free Packt account to unlock a world of extra content!
A free Packt account unlocks extra newsletters, articles, discounted offers, and much more. Start advancing your knowledge today.
Unlock this book and the full library FREE for 7 days
Get unlimited access to 7000+ expert-authored eBooks and videos courses covering every tech area you can think of
Renews at $19.99/month. Cancel anytime