Leveraging Workers in Dependencies

We are using Elixir partially because it provides an excellent foundation for concurrency. The worker layer is a concurrency management layer, and in this section, we’ll look at the different tools at our disposal to manage concurrency. We’ll start with some of the most basic ones:

• Dependencies will allow us to include the work of others.

• Processes are Elixir concurrency primitives we can lean on in a pinch, but typically we’ll be working at a higher level of abstraction.

• Tasks will allow us to do one-off jobs and still rely on the rich OTP library.

• Connection-pooling libraries let us share long-running connections across processes.

Finally, we can integrate existing frameworks that provide OTP abstractions that serve as containers for our code.

Let’s look at the simplest example possible for starting a worker, the dependency.

Using dependencies

The easiest way to use concurrency in Elixir is to leverage code someone else has already written. When we think about it, that’s not such a strange concept. Most of us don’t use much recursion in our day-to-day code because we can lean on Enum’s implementations to do that work for us. Many of Elixir’s most popular dependencies are full OTP ...