[sasa555]

The atom always means the same thing - a symbolic (named) constant.

The dot operator can be used on an atom type to invoke a function from the corresponding module. A capital Foo.Bar is called an alias in Elixir, and it's the same as an atom :"Elixir.Foo.Bar".

The usage of __MODULE__ is optional. You can also write %Buffer.Ets{...} if you prefer.

There's no hidden magic with %__MODULE__{buffer | ...}. It's an "update" syntax which allows you to take an existing "struct" (essentially a bunch of well-known named fields), and create a transformed version of it with some fields changed. The code %__MODULE__{buffer | size: buffer.size + 1} is therefore the same as %Buffer.Ets{buffer | size: buffer.size + 1}, and it evaluates to a transformed buffer with the size field set to the size of the original buffer incremented by 1.

The original buffer is left intact (since you can't do in-place data mutation in Elixir). However, the transformed version is not a full deep copy of the original. It's going to share as much data as possible with the original version.

Hope that helps :-)