Introduction to the Flow Library
Explore the Flow library in Elixir to understand how it enables concurrent processing of large data collections. Learn to convert sequential data functions into parallel operations using Flow's simple API. Understand how Flow leverages GenStage for back-pressure and concurrency, and integrate it with existing pipelines to enhance data processing efficiency.
The Enum and Stream modules
Since Elixir is a functional language and all data is immutable, most Elixir developers quickly get accustomed to using functions like map, filter, and reduce on a daily basis. These and other data-processing functions, found in the Enum and Stream modules, are essential to functional programming and help us transform data in various ways.
The limitations of Enum and Stream
However, as the amount of data we have to process grows, so does the time it takes to finish the work. We already have a few tools at our disposal to run code concurrently, but implementing frequently used functions like reduce and group_by in parallel is going to be challenging. Thankfully, there is already a solution available to us on the Hex registry.