Elixir

Spawning processes

Apr 1, 2016

spawn creates a new Erlang VM process to run a given module, function, and arguments and returns its process id pid.

defmodule Bob do
  def say(message) do
    IO.puts "[#{inspect self}] Bob says: #{message}"
  end
end

iex> Bob.say "I'm Bob"
[#PID<0.57.0>] Bob says: sup
:ok

iex> spawn(Bob, :say, ["I'm Bob"])
[#PID<0.101.0>] Bob says: I'm Bob
#PID<0.101.0>

self returns the current process’ pid

Check the PIDs that are printed. We’ve just run the Bob.say function as a separate process.

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