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...
