How Erlang Communicates with External Programs
Erlang communicates with external programs through objects called ports. If we send a message to a port, the message will be sent to the external program connected to the port. Messages from the external program will appear as Erlang messages that come from the ports.
As far as the programmer is concerned, the port behaves just like an Erlang process. You can send messages to it, you can register it (just like a process), and so on. If the external program crashes, then an exit signal will be sent to the connected process, and if the connected process dies, then the external program will be killed.
Note the difference between using a port to communicate with an external process and a socket. ...
Get Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
