actor
Use cases of coroutines in elixir
I am new to elixir and also the concept of co-routines. I am trying to warp my head around how we can make use of time slice like explained here https://stackoverflow.com/a/19033882/492293
Lets say i have a list with 10,000 items and i want to process the list with coroutines.
Lets say i have 5 coroutines that i am using to process the list. My thinking is that i divide the list of 10,000 between the 5 coroutines and have each coroutine assigned 2,000 items.
I would then use time slice to visit each 2,000 items make some progress jump to the next do the same and do this until each and every item in the groups of 2000 are all visited and processed.
Is this an acceptable use of time slice or wouldn it be faster to just process the 20,000 in one function?.
Thanks.
Most Liked
al2o3cr
Under the hood, the BEAM is already doing a sort of time-slicing:
For your case of a large list, look into Task.async_stream which does something very close to what you’ve described (spins up multiple processes to work through a large list).
NobbZ
There are no coroutines in elixir.
dimitarvp
Using Elixir builtins like Task.async_stream and the Flow library gives you transparent parallelism / concurrency, and having in mind that the Erlang/Elixir runtime (the BEAM VM) is already preemptively scheduled then you get parallel computations almost for free and with very little syntactic overhead.
I strongly recommend you review both linked docs.
And yep, as others said, Erlang/Elixir already have “coroutines” in the form of processes (not to be confused with OS processes) that are fairly time-sliced, automatically for you.
Popular in Questions
Other popular topics
Latest on Elixir Forum
Sponsor Spotlight
Catch errors, track performance, monitor hosts and more.
Categories:
Sub Categories:
Forums
Our Sponsors
Build Elixir applications with speed and confidence.
Supporting innovation across the BEAM ecosystem.
We build reliable cloud platforms for business-critical systems.
Catch errors, track performance, monitor hosts and more.
Practical resources that improve the lives of professional developers.
Develop your skills with books, videos, and courses.
Enabling companies to succeed by building software people love.
Courses that'll move you from confusion to "Aha, now I get it!"