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Concurrency: the reason we're here

A bit of background

In Elixir, all code runs inside processes. Processes are isolated from each other, run concurrent to one another and communicate via message passing. Processes are not only the basis for concurrency in Elixir, but they also provide the means for building distributed and fault-tolerant programs.

Elixir’s processes should not be confused with operating system processes. Processes in Elixir are extremely lightweight in terms of memory and CPU (unlike threads in many other programming languages). Because of this, it is not uncommon to have tens or even hundreds of thousands of processes running simultaneously.

Processes

The most basic mechanism for creating processes is using the spawn/1 function:

annrayc

=Navigating=
    visit('/projects')
    visit(post_comments_path(post))

=Clicking links and buttons=
    click_link('id-of-link')
    click_link('Link Text')
    click_button('Save')
    click('Link Text') # Click either a link or a button
    click('Button Value')