4 ms·

Common idiom in Erlang. Using message passing (untested code): do_something(N) -> Pid = self(), spawn(fun() -> find_x(Pid, N) end),

• mononcqc 15y ago
  Unless you specifically need a timer, I wouldn't use that and would simply return {ok, N} or {error, not_found}; that would avoid useless copying and message passing. Something like: find_x(N) -> find_x (N, [1, 3, 5]). find_x(N, []) -> {error, not_found}; find_x(N, [N|_T]) -> {ok, N}; find_x(N, [_H|T]) -> find_x(N, T). If what you want is to get out of deep recursion and the above doesn't work especially well, that's what 'throw/1' is for: Res = try find_x(N) of Val -> {ok, Val} catch throw:not_found -> {error, not_found} end. This will allow to avoid the stack, special cases for returning values and give you the code result you need. The spawning of a process for a simple use case like this is only worth it if you need a timer to give a maximum execution time for a given request. Otherwise, it's not very useful, clear or efficient. I'd mark it as 'concurrency for the sake of it'.