Chapter 6. Concurrent Programming – Using Processes to Conquer Concurrency
We have gone through most of the basic syntax of Elixir; we covered modules, functions, types, branching, recursion, and pattern matching. If that's all there was, we would be done. We would know enough of the language to be able to do most things, although, not very elegantly, but we would be finished. However, there is another world emerging, and it has been emerging for some time now—concurrent processing.
Chip manufacturers are no longer focusing on how frequent we can make a chip cycle (hertz, now measured on the Giga scale), they are more interested in how many cores we can put onto a chip. Dual core chips weren't common 12 years ago, but now, we are looking at machines with 4, 8, and even 12 cores, being common among desktops and laptops. These core counts were usually only available in high-end servers, but are now the norm, even for phones!
But this is where our problem as...