GenServers for Code Organization
Explore the proper use of GenServers in Elixir programming to manage shared state, concurrency, and supervision. Understand why GenServers should not be misused for general code organization, and how improper use can create performance bottlenecks. Learn to differentiate cases requiring GenServers from those better handled by simple modules with functions, improving code clarity and application efficiency.
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Strengths of GenServer
We just saw an example that plays to all of the GenServer strengths. GenServer is a beautiful abstraction, and like anything good in the hands of an inexperienced developer, it’s prone to overuse. Let’s look at some of its properties. A GenServer does the following things:
- It encapsulates a shared service.
- It holds state.
- It allows concurrent access to shared resources.
- It handles supervision to take care of normal and abnormal startup and cleanup.
These are the problems a GenServer is built to solve. The previous ...