Koodihommia

As any developer heading towards a burn-out, I spent my summer vacation learning a new programming language. I chose Elixir because it is a functional language with actor-like programming style. I thought that at least the latter feature would help me get started. Actually, the first thing I ended up figuring out was how the Erlang runtime works. I was interested in how the Erlang processes work in relation to the operating system. It turned out that the concurrency model is not based on spawning multiple user level threads but rather on Erlang runtime abstractions which isolate the running code to the Erlang processes which can communicate with each other via message passing. Erlang runtime has a scheduler which can run multiple processes concurrently on the runtime with a limited set of OS user level threads (number of available CPU threads). This is hardly surprising after reading about high performing applications written in Erlang. Threads can be expensive especially in the ca