Mastering Elixir

Exceptions

Much like if and else, exceptions in Elixir aren't used as much as in other popular imperative languages. Exceptions aren't used for control flow, and are left for when truly exceptional things occur. When they do, your process is usually running under a supervision tree, and upon crashing, the supervisor of your process will be notified and (possibly, depending on the strategy) restart it. Then, upon being restarted, you're back to a known and stable state, and the effects of the exceptional event are no longer present. In the Elixir and Erlang communities, this is usually referred to as the "Let it crash!" philosophy. We'll be examining this in greater detail in Chapter 3, Processes – The Bedrock for Concurrency and Fault Tolerance ...