Chapter 4. Concurrent Programming

Concurrency is the ability for different functions to execute in parallel without affecting each other unless explicitly programmed to do so. Each concurrent activity in Erlang is called a process. The only way for processes to interact with each other is through message passing, where data is sent from one process to another. The philosophy behind Erlang and its concurrency model is best described by Joe Armstrong’s tenets:

• The world is concurrent.

• Things in the world don’t share data.

• Things communicate with messages.

• Things fail.

The concurrency model and its error-handling mechanisms were built into Erlang from the start. With lightweight processes, it is not unusual to have hundreds of thousands, even millions, of processes running in parallel, often with a small memory footprint. The ability of the runtime system to scale concurrency to these levels directly affects the way programs are developed, differentiating Erlang from other concurrent programming languages.

What if you were to use Erlang to write an instant messaging (IM) server, supporting the transmission of messages between thousands of users in a system such as Google Talk or Facebook? The Erlang design philosophy is to spawn a new process for every event so that the program structure directly reflects the concurrency of multiple users exchanging messages. In an IM system, an event could be a presence update, a message being sent or received, or a login request. Each process will service the event it handles, and terminate when the request has been completed.

You could do the same in C or Java, but you would struggle when scaling the system to hundreds of thousands of concurrent events. An option might be to have a pool of processes handling specific event types or particular users, but certainly not a new process for every event. Erlang gets away with this because it does not use native threads to represent processes. It has its own scheduler in the virtual machine (VM), making the creation of processes very efficient while at the same time minimizing their memory footprint. This efficiency is maintained regardless of the number of concurrent processes in the system. The same argument applies for message passing, where the time to send a message is negligible and constant, regardless of the number of processes. This chapter introduces concurrent programming in Erlang, letting you in on one of the most powerful concurrency models available today.