Having learned how to create a new project in Elixir, we will now dive into one of the cornerstones of Elixir (inherited from Erlang): processes. Understanding how to work with them is paramount to creating concurrent and fault-tolerant applications in Elixir. Your typical application will easily contain hundreds, if not thousands, of processes running concurrently.
If this last sentence has raised some concerns over running thousands of processes in a single machine, note that we're referring to Erlang VM processes, which are much lighter than Operating System (OS) processes. Throughout this chapter, and the rest of the book, process refers to an Erlang VM process—unless we directly mention OS process.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Erlang VM's inner workings and concurrency...
