A Simple Process

One of Elixir’s key features is the idea of packaging code into small chunks that can be run independently and concurrently.

Concurrent programming is known to be difficult, and there’s a performance penalty to pay when we create lots of processes.

Elixir doesn’t have these issues, thanks to the architecture of the Erlang VM on which it runs. Elixir uses the actor model of concurrency. An actor is an independent process that shares nothing with any other process. We can spawn new processes, send them messages, and receive messages back. And that’s it.