Processes

Creating Processes

We create a new concurrent process by calling the spawn function. The spawn function will get as parameter a function Fun that the process will evaluate. The return value of the spawn function is the created process identifier (pid).

1> Fun = fun() -> 2+2 end.
#Fun<erl_eval.20.52032458>
2> Pid = spawn(Fun).
<0.60.0>

You can also use spawn/3 to start a process that will execute a specific function from a module: spawn(Module, Function, Args).
Or use spawn/2 or spawn/4 similarly to start a process in a different node: spawn(Node, Fun) or spawn(Node, Module, Function, Args).

Message Passing

Two erlang processes can communicate with each other, wich is also known as message passing.
This procedure is asynchronous in the form that the sending process will not halt after sending the message.

Sending Messages

This can be achieved with the construct Pid ! Message, where Pid is a valid process identifier (pid) and Message is a value of any data type.

Each process has a “mailbox” that contains the received messages in the received order. This “mailbox” can be emptied with the build in flush/0 function.

If a message is send to a non existing process, the message will be discarded without any error!

An example might look like the following, where self/0 returns the pid of the current process and pid/3 creates a pid.

1> Pidsh = self().
<0.32.0>
2> Pidsh ! hello.
hello
3> flush().
Shell got hello
ok
4> <0.32.0> ! hello.
* 1: syntax error before: ’<’
5> Pidsh2 = pid(0,32,0).
<0.32.0>
6> Pidsh2 ! hello2.
hello2
7> flush().
Shell got hello2
ok

It is also possible to send a message to multiple processes at once, with Pid3!Pid2!Pid1!Msg.

Receiving Messages

Received messages can be processed with the receive construct.

receive
  Pattern1            -> exp11, .., exp1n1;
  Pattern2 when Guard -> exp21, .., exp2n2;
  ...
  Other               -> exp31, .., exp3n3;
  ...
  after Timeout       -> exp41, .., exp4n4
end

The Pattern will be compared to the messages in the “mailbox” starting with the first and oldest message.
If a pattern matches, the matched message is removed from the “mailbox” and the clause body is evaluated.

It is also possible to define timeouts with the after construct.
A Timeout is either the waiting time in milliseconds or the atom infinity.

The return value of receive is the last evaluated clause body.

Example (Counter)

A (very) simple counter with message passing might look like in the following.

-module(counter0).
-export([start/0,loop/1]).

% Creating the counter process.
start() ->
    spawn(counter0, loop, [0]).

% The counter loop.
loop(Val) ->
    receive
        increment ->
           loop(Val + 1)
    end.

Interaction with the counter.

1> C0 = counter0:start().
<0.39.0>
2> C0!increment.
increment
3> C0!increment.
increment

Register Processes

It is possible to register a process (pid) to a global alias.
This can be achieved with the build in register(Alias, Pid) function, where Alias is the atom to access the process as and Pid is the process id.

The alias will be globally available!
It is very easy to create shared state, wich is usually not preferable. (See also here)

It is possible to unregister a process with unregister(Pid) and receive the pid from an alias with whereis(Alias).

Use registered() for a list of all registered aliases.

The example registers the Atom foo to the pid of the current process and sends a message using the registered Atom.

1> register(foo, self()).
true
2> foo ! 'hello world'.
'hello world'