Does an Elixir process die when there are no more references to its PID?

Question

New to Elixir and OTP. Trying some hello-world examples with GenServer. I'm writing tests where each test spawns a GenServer process. They are not explicitly terminated. Will the process die after the test finishes?

Follow up: If it's not terminated, do they turn into "zombie" process? Also, is there a pattern for terminating them after the test completes?

Answer 1

No, processes are not garbage collected. Yes, they turn into "zombie" processes.

The pattern to prevent that is to link the processes. When one linked process terminates - all linked processes will terminate too. So if you start your server using GenServer.start_link from the test process - this will link the server process to the test process and when the test exists, the server will exit too.