GenServer as a Coordinator
Explore how GenServer serves as a coordinator in Elixir by managing mutable state and coordinating activities among multiple processes. Learn to implement resource allocation, process monitoring, and automatic cleanup to build fault-tolerant concurrent applications.
We'll cover the following...
In the previous lesson, we peeked at all of the concerns a GenServer handles for us when we attempted to implement a mutable counter. At the same time, we have also shown how we can implement a very simple counter with agents in four lines of code. Behind the scenes, agents are implemented with GenServers. Therefore, if we want to use a GenServer, we need more than just a mutable state. One such example is when we need a process to coordinate the activities of multiple other processes.
Allocation in concurrent systems
In a concurrent system, coordinating the allocation and release of resources is sometimes demanding. Elixir developers rarely rely on try/catch or try/rescue ...