[tomasol]

Yeah, looks like Golem went similar route - using WASM Component Model and wasmtime.

There is always this chicken and egg problem on a new platform, but I am hoping that LLMs can solve it partially - the activities are just HTTP clients with no complex logic.

Regarding the restrictions required for determinism, they only apply to workflows, not activities. Workflows should be describing just the business logic. All the complexities of retries, failure recovery, replay after server crash etc. are handled by the runtime. The WASM sandbox makes it impossible to introduce non-determinism - it would cause a compile error so no need for runtime checks.

[jcmfernandes]

I understand what you mean by being able to fully sandbox things and guarantee determinism, a must for the workflows and not the activities (using temporal lingo).

When you say that the runtime handles, for example, retries, doesn't that require me to depend on your HTTP client component? Or do I also need to compile activities to WASM and have obelisk running them because they are essentially background jobs (that is, you have workers pulling)?

Finally, do you see the component's interface as the right layer for capturing IO? I'm imagining people attempting to run managed code (Java, python, ruby, etc.). The VMs can do thousands of syscallls before they start executing they user's code. Logging them one by one seems crazy, but I also don't see an alternative.

EDIT:

I RTFM and found the answers to my first two questions in the README :)

[tomasol]

> do I also need to compile activities to WASM

Yes, currently all activities must conform to the WASI 0.2 standard. This is the simplest for deployment, as you only need the obelisk executable, toml config file. The webhooks, workflows and activities pulled from a OCI registry on startup.

To support native code I plan to add external activities as well, with an interface similar to what Netflix Conductor uses for its workers.

> Finally, do you see the component's interface as the right layer for capturing IO?

An activity must encapsulate something much higher level than a single IO operation. So something like "Configure BGP on a router", "Start a VM" etc. It needs to be able to handle retries and thus be idempotent.

Regarding performance, a workflow execution can call 500-700 child executions serially, or around 1400 child executions concurrently per second.