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Make any TypeScript function durable
- Etheryte 1y agoOf all the syntax options they could've gone with, they settled on what I would say is arguably the worst. If you want a one-liner, decorators are widely used across different languages and Typescript supports them as well.
- javcasas 1y agoMy bad, this is open telemetry stuff to check the status of your servers, not for vendors to extract as much data as they can from you. > I'm trying to find how they implemented the "use workflow" thing, and before I could find it I already found https://github.com/vercel/workflow/blob/main/packages/core/src/telemetry.ts https://github.com/vercel/workflow/blob/main/packages/core/s... > Telemetry is part of the core. > Yuck.
- nakovet 1y agoIt's on the landing page, there is not even a standalone mode yet, so you can't use it with node.js you need to use with Next.js. All to say, it's just early alpha preview, I would wait the project to mature before considering using it anywhere.
- javcasas 1y agoMy bad, this is open telemetry stuff to check the status of your servers, not for the vendor to slurp as much data from you as possible.
- evilduck 1y agoThis is Open Telemetry functions you're referencing. Being able to trace, profile and debug your own code that's executing in a highly distributed environment is a pretty useful thing. This isn't (necessarily) user behavior telemetry. At least understand what you're looking at before getting the ick.
- javcasas 1y agoThat's fair. I'm too accustomed to seeing the other type of telemetry shoved in all over the place.
- skrebbel 1y agoGood luck running a server without any sort of telemetry. How will you debug stuff without logs and traces? Seems to me that the priorities are with practical, real everyday engineering concerns.
- oompydoompy74 1y agoIt’s apparently an swc compiler plugin.
- tom1337 1y agoYea but it's a vercel product and they also pushed the 'use server' and 'use client' directives and probably want to build on them.
- ajkjk 1y agoor no-op functions like useWorkflow() (with some kind of stub that prevents dead code elimination).
- MrJohz 1y agoDecorators don't work for functions, unfortunately, so wouldn't work in this case. You'd need to add a bunch of class boilerplate to make it work. JavaScript didn't have a lot of great options for this kind of statically-declared metaprogramming, which is why the "use X"; syntax has become so popular in various spaces. It's definitely not my favourite approach, but I don't think there's any clear "best" solution here.
- halflife 1y agoYou can use generator fns to achieve the exact same thing without magic strings or bundles. And the bonus is that you can debug it.
- MrJohz 1y agoI don't believe you can. I believe what they're trying to do is rewrite the underlying function into separate functions that can be called in any order and combination. That's not possible with generators. With a generator, I can pause between steps, but I can't, say, retry the third step four times until it succeeds, suspend the entire process, and then jump straight to the fourth step. Or I can't run different steps in different processes on different machines depending on load balancing concerns. I suspect that's why they need to transform the function into individual step functions, and for that they need to do static analysis. And if they're doing static analysis, then all the concerns detailed here and elsewhere apply and you're basically just picking your favourite of a bunch of syntaxes with different tradeoffs. I don't like magic strings, but at least they clearly indicate that magic is happening, which is useful for the developer reading the code.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- quacky_batak 1y agoi hate the new pattern of using these magic strings everywhere. “use workflow”, “use client”, etc etc. I don’t like having custom bundler logic for my code.
- javcasas 1y agoCustom bundler + telemetry already included. Smells way too much like Microsoft, too much like lock-in with a deal that gets worse and worse.
- brazukadev 1y ago"don't use next" "don't use react"
- nawgz 1y agoPlease, bundling React with Next is completely foolish. React is open, battle-hardened, type safe, and well-documented, while Next is... a vendor lock-in trojan horse targeting low-knowledge developers with concepts that seem beginner-friendly. I can understand making legit criticisms of React, no doubt the hooks transition had some issues and the library has a high level of complexity without a clear winner in the state management domain, but pretending React is peddling shit like "use workflow" is frankly low effort.
- fullstackchris 1y agoJust shows you how absolutely little people know about the web ecosystem - most people heard something once or twice from someone else and just assume its true - to make matters worse, you have the typical HN "vanilla html and js only!!!" bandwagon which, if you try to use for any serious web application will only lead you down a path of much pain and suffering. I've commented many times in many other threads that I just don't get it; I probably never will.
- brazukadev 1y agoMate, don't get mad at us just because you can't code without a framework. React was created to make low skilled people capable of shipping low quality code. If that is the only thing you can do, I'd be careful about calling yourself fullstackchris
- tom1337 1y agoSo at it's core this is "just" a toolkit to add automatic retries to functions inside another function? I don't know if the audience Vercel is targetig knows about idempotency as well as they should before plastering all their functions with "use workflow". I guess in the end it's another abstraction layer for queues or state machines and another way to lock you into Vercel.
- 0xb0565e486 1y agoSomewhat related since this about "workflows" and not cloud function, but are there any practical benefits to cloud functions other than the fact that it's cheaper for the providers as they don't have to run an entire bespoke runtime for every customer/application?
- drawfloat 1y agoUse client and use server aren’t great, but the fact they had to be declared at the top of a file was at least clear. Starting to scatter magic strings throughout a code base feels like a real step back.
- c-hendricks 1y agoThere's nothing about "use server" that requires it to be at the top of the file though, it can go in function bodies and you have a typed RPC method. I think "use client" is the only one that has to go at the top of a file.
- TimReynolds 1y agoYou are correct. Use server can be slapped in many places
- halflife 1y agoSo vercel is adamant on making nextjs apps behavior completely unpredictable and hidden behind tons of magic code? At least in any other framework library I can just command click and see why things are not working, place breakpoints and even modify code.
- lopatin 1y agoIt’s a great business model with epic lock in. Bored front end devs keep indulging / enabling it so why stop?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pavel_lishin 1y agoAm I stupid, or does the page not actually explain that workflow is?
- davey48016 1y agoIt doesn't explain it on the landing page. Even skimming their docs, it seems like you mostly have to infer the purpose of this based on the features.
- zzixp 1y agoThis is actually pretty cool. We have a similar custom library at Xbox that's used extensively across all of our services. I do wish that there was some kind of self-hostable World implementation at launch. If other PAAS providers jump onto this, I could see this sticking around.
- lloydatkinson 1y agoAzures Durable Task Framework or something else? I guess there’s nothing public on it, which is a shame because it sounds interesting
- schniz 1y agoHi I’m Gal from the team. Thanks! We did ship a reference Postgres implementation. It would receive more love now that we open sourced, but we can’t call it “production ready” without running it in production. But we did have convos in the last couple of days on what we can do next on the pg world ;D
- khalic 1y agoThis seems... bad, inelegant.
- lioeters 1y agoNot only is it ugly in terms of language design, the feature depends on over-engineered frameworks like Next.js and Nitro. Magic string literals that rewrite your functions? No thanks.
- ssijak 1y agoLost me at "use workflow" directive. This and Next16 expanding the set of directives just makes me question if I'm the mad man for thinking they are absolutely terrible.
- dangoodmanUT 1y agoim becoming increasinglymore convinced that workflows are the wrong model just build state machines folks
- rubenfiszel 1y agoworkflows is just short for state machine DSL
- dangoodmanUT 1y agobut with history length and replay determinism landmines
- slinkydeveloper 11mo agoNot sure why these not issues with state machines... With RSM you often need to keep the history as well, just in a different form, that is the message/event log that your state machine processed. With RSM you need your code to be deterministic to rebuild the materialized state during failover, unless you snapshot and replicate the state on each processed event/message.
- TimTheTinker 1y agoI'd rather be explicit about what's going on at each step. That way idempotent functions can be handled differently, retry limits can be applied, and no separate preprocessor is required. export async function welcome(userId: string) { const user = await retry(() => getUser(userId)); const { subject, body } = await retry(() => generateEmail({ name: user.name, plan: user.plan })); const { status } = await retry(() => sendEmail({ to: user.email, subject, body, }), 2); return { status, subject, body }; }
- LewisJEllis 1y agocan anyone point to the "Durable" part? looking at the docs and examples, I see Workflows and Steps and Retries, but I don't see any Durable yet. none of the examples really make it clear how or where anything gets stored
- schniz 1y agoThat depends on the “world”. We built an adapter interface so you could store the data (and other things) anywhere you want. There are some docs which are wip regarding that: https://useworkflow.dev/docs/deploying/world https://useworkflow.dev/docs/deploying/world
- LewisJEllis 1y agothanks, helpful read!
- lloydjones 1y ago"use turnMyBrainOff"; "use blackBoxWrapperForEverything";
- 8note 1y agowell that's some scary typescript syntax. i didnt know a string constant at the top of a function could change the operation. or is this some extra compilation step to rewrite the code?
- AgentME 1y agoThis seems pretty similar to Cloudflare Workflows (https://developers.cloudflare.com/workflows/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/workflows/), but with code-rewriting to use syntax magic (functions annotated with "use workflow" and "use step") instead of Cloudflare's `step.do` and `step.sleep` function calls. (I think I lightly prefer Cloudflare's model for not relying on a code-rewriting step, partly because I think it's easier for programmers to see what's going on in the system.) Workflow's Hooks are similar to Cloudflare's `step.waitForEvent` + `instance.sendEvent`. It's kind of exciting to see this programming model get more popular. I wonder if the ecosystem can evolve into a standardized model.
- tonyhb 1y agoActually, both Vercel and Cloudflare are based off of the API that we built at https://inngest.com https://inngest.com (disclaimer, I'm a founder). I strongly believe that being obvious about steps with `step.run` is important: it improves o11y, makes things explicit, and you can see transactional boundaries.
- seivan 1y ago[dead]
- trevor-e 1y agoSo this seems similar to https://temporal.io/ https://temporal.io/, am I reading this right? I used that briefly a few years ago and it was pretty nice at the time. It did make some features much easier to model like their welcome email example. Would love to hear from someone with extensive temporal experience, iirc the only drawback was on the infra side of things.
- oulipo2 1y agoAnd to DBOS too
- tauchunfall 1y agoIt's also similar to https://www.restate.dev/ https://www.restate.dev/.
- tomp1998 1y ago[dead]
- oulipo2 1y agoIt's not really clear how you "update" a workflow/step method? What happens if you saw a bug, or you want to update and change a workflow? Is there a way to discard / upgrade the existing in-memory workflows that are being executed (and correspond to the previous version) so they are now "updated"?
- game_the0ry 1y agoGuillermo + Vercel should slow down and concentrate more on fixing the bugs with nextjs instead of adding more features no one asked for.
- nawgz 1y agoDocs seem really underbaked. - where does the state and telemetry get stored? - if something is sleeping for 7 days, and you release a new version in that time, what is invoked? - how do you configure retries? Looks like it retries forever And I echo the hatred of the magic strings. Terrible dx
- qianli_cs 1y agoI'm excited about this because durable workflows are really important for making AI applications production ready :) Disclaimer: I'm working on DBOS, a durable workflow library built on Postgres, which looks complementary to this. I asked their main developer Dillon about the data/durability layer and also the compilation step. I wonder if adding a "DBOS World" will be feasible. That way, you get Postgres-backed durable workflows, queues, messaging, streams, etc all in one package, while the "use workflow" interface remains the same. Here is the response from Dillon, and I hope it's useful for the discussion here: > "The primary datastore is dynamodb and is designed to scale to support tens of thousands of v0 size tenants running hundreds of thousands of concurrent workflows and steps." > "That being said, you don't need to use Vercel as a backend to use the workflow SDK - we have created a interface for anyone to implements called 'World' that you can use any tech stack for https://github.com/vercel/workflow/blob/main/packages/world/src/interfaces.ts#L52-L115 https://github.com/vercel/workflow/blob/main/packages/world/..." > "you will require a compiler step as that's what picks up 'use workflow' and 'use step` and applies source transformations. The node.js run time limitations only apply to the outer wrapper function w/ `use workflow`"
- jadbox 1y ago"Next.js only" Thanks, no thanks. Neat idea though. (I'm mostly using Bun+React)
- fullstackchris 1y agoI can almost with 100% certainty see this being one of those things that ultimately, after years of just blantantly ignoring something as simple as basic syntax rules, being redefined to something that is actually valid JavaScript / TypeScript.
- bern4444 1y ago> For instance, Math.random and Date constructors are fixed in workflow runs, so you are safe to use them and the framework ensures that the values don't change across replays. How do you create an environment where everything is deterministic? Do they invoke every supported non deterministic function when creating the environment and rewrite those functions to return the values from the environment's creation time? Is there something more complex happening?
- sampli 1y agoThis is a horrid pattern to try to get people to rely on. Stop with the magic
- sevender 1y agoShameless plug: I’ve been working on a similar thing for Golang: zenyth.dev Durability is achieved by running the workflows in a wasm runtime.
- punkbit 1y agoIs this a durable execution engine/solution?
- moritzwarhier 1y agoSkipping the part that defines what a "durable" function means is typical Vercel. It's probably a common async functional programming term that I don't know. But when "algebraic effects" were all the rage, the people evangelizing them at least cared to explain first in their blog posts. This one instead straight jumps via AI agents (what does this have to do with TypeScript syntax extensions?) to "installation". No thanks. Edit: I've read the examples after commenting and it's understandable, still explained in a post-hoc way that I really dislike, especially when it comes to a proprietary syntax extension. Also the examples for their async "steps" look like they are only one step away from assuming that any async function is some special Next.js thing with assumptions about clients and servers, not "just" async functions with some annotation to allow the "use workflow" to do its magic.
- Spivak 1y agoEvery durable function platform is so disappointing because they all try to work without solving the hard problem: serializing, snapshotting, and restoring a running program. They all have some API that pushes the work of state management and safepoints on to you the developer. Once you have the primitive of real durable compute all the hard bits fall away. And it's not as if this is some fantasy, VM live migration is a real working example of it working. Then you just write your program in the grug way, use your language's built in retry tools and store state in normal variables because the entire thing is durable including memory, cpu state, gpu state, network state, open files, etc..