🔗 Building distributed systems in Elixir: Part 1 - Building a stateful process in Elixir without GenServer

What if a counter could be a process instead of just a variable? This article introduces the concept of building stateful processes in Elixir without using GenServer, focusing on the underlying message-passing model. The author, Krishnadas, details the creation of a simple counter process using only basic constructs like spawn, send, and receive. The piece illustrates how multiple clients can interact with the counter while maintaining the integrity of its state. By allowing processes to own their state and communicate solely through messages, Elixir embraces a design that minimizes synchronization issues commonly seen in multithreaded environments. This foundational understanding prepares readers for the more complex topics of OTP and distributed messaging to be discussed in future articles.