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michaelmior | 29 days ago
I'm curious what portability concerns you've run into with JSON serialization. Unless you need to deal with binary data for some reason, I don't immediately see an issue.
> Such representation, which is by the way specified to be executable bidirectionally (roll back capabilities), is a full blown program
Of course this depends on the complexity of your problem, but I'd imagine this could be as simple as a few configuration flags for some problems. You have a function to execute the process that takes the configuration and a function to roll back that takes the same configuration. This does tie the representation very closely to the program itself so it doesn't work if you want to be able to change the program and have previously generated "plans" continue to work.
friendzis|28 days ago
The hard part concerns instructions and it is not technical implementation of serializing an in-memory data structures into serialization format (be it JSON or something bespoke) that is the root of complexity.
> You have a function to execute the process that takes the configuration and a function to roll back that takes the same configuration.
Don't forget granularity and state tracking. The opposite of a seemingly simple operation like "set config option foo to bar" is not a straightforward inverse: you need to track the previous value. Does the dry run stop at computing the final value for foo and leaves possible access control issues to surface during real run or does it perform "write nothing" operation to catch those?
> This does tie the representation very closely to the program itself so it doesn't work if you want to be able to change the program and have previously generated "plans" continue to work.
Why serialize then? Dump everything into one process space and call the native functions. Serialization implies either strictly, out of band controlled interfaces, which is a fragile implementation of codegen+interpreter machinery.