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/Strategy 2: Communicating via I/O with Ports
Strategy 2: Communicating via I/O with Ports
Learn how to communicate with external software using ports.
We'll cover the following...
Ports provide a safer alternative to integrate with external software. Each port starts the third-party software as a separate process in the operating system. If that port terminates, the Elixir code gets a message, and we can act accordingly. A segmentation fault in the external port won’t bring the Elixir system down.
It is possible that we’ve already spawned ports in our Elixir applications, like this:
System.cmd("elixir", ["-e", "IO.puts 21 * 2"])
Now, try running this in the terminal below.
Please click the “Click to Connect” at the center of the terminal to start it.
This command finds the elixir executable in the operating system and invokes it, passing the command-line arguments -e, for code evaluation, and the contents IO.puts 21 * 2. Then, System.cmd returns the result written to the standard ...