alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Waymark – A workflow engine that compiles jobs instead of replaying
Hey everyone! @mozgiii and I have been working on Waymark for the better part of the last year. Waymark’s an open source durable execution library with similar functionality to Temporal or DBOS.
I fell in love with durable execution a few years ago, after working at a company with a heavy pubsub architecture. In comparison to job orchestrators that force a certain task design or special syntax, many of these durable libs lets you write business logic in regular code: `asyncio.gather` to parallelize tasks, `for` loops, conditionals, and let the runtime figure out how to run them efficiently across a cluster of nodes. But most of the current solutions require a heavy broker, runtime hacks to try to ensure deterministic workflow logic, and feel like you have to learn a whole new ecosystem just to get started.
A few unique design decisions in waymark:
— Write jobs in normal code (right now Python but JS coming soon). Instead of running control flow as-is, which requires booting up an interpreter to replay past state, we’ll just compile your code directly. We walk your AST and map your logic to our stackless VM bytecode. We support variables, conditionals, await, sleep, helper functions, loops... basically what you’d expect in workflow logic.
— Since we’re compiling a language subset, we can proactively flag errors in your workflows locally instead of when they run in production.
— It only requires Postgres as the task broker. We’ve spent a lot of time tuning our design to play nicely with its strengths and limitations; our current benchmarks show around 1500 workflows/second but we still have some more optimization work to do here.
— Actions plug-and-play with FastAPI’s dependency injection syntax. So if you already have an ecosystem based on typehinting/DI, it should fit like a glove.
It allows for parallelization of workflows across one machine or a whole cluster. The bulk of the work per node is done by our central Rust core - which distributes workflows to properly saturate all cores. The idea is to be as batteries included as possible with the broker, webapp, and runtime.
What to use it for? It works great as the runner loop controlling agents, but it also works well for basically any task that you need to kick off in the background. It’s largely replaced our way of writing api code. Most frontend actions at this point just push to a simple REST endpoint that kick off a background job.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time making our https://waymark.sh site interactive - it’s probably the best place to learn more. We’re starting with Python support and looking for community input on what language to ship next. Would love to hear your thoughts!
Comments
This is so cool. I spent years at Pachyderm (YC...something) banging our head against:
- we're "Bazel for data"
- but...we have no Starlark. We're trying to port Airflow but it's not playing well with the way we cache partial results.
Amazing to me that I'm only now seeing the architecture pattern of "pure coordination language connecting sandboxed imperative components", which is used by Nix and Bazel, applied to distributed workflows. If somebody applied this to batch data processing you might have a Pachyderm that actually works better than ours did.
Nice project! (And website!)
Great to see some experimentation in this space. I really like the idea of 'make this async function a background process' using a simple annotation.
What kind of IR do you use? I often wonder what a WASM based durable execution engine would look like. And what that pattern would unlock.
Does it handle checkpoints corrections mid run?
Durable execution has been on my radar for a minute but, although I've had a few pubsub usecases here and there, I've never had much call for long-running jobs that weren't simply cheaper to restart, AFAIR.
With agentic workloads, though—especially trending towards high network calls and smaller models—I do find a lot of concurrency to be a pain in the ass to pick up where we left off. Is that what "durability" ameliorates?
I just wonder what I'm leaving on the table.
I completely understand that it might be because I've never suffered the pain associated with the thing you're purporting to solve, but I really don't understand what Waymark does.
I find this really common on HN - someone posts a project that addresses a problem and all the intro and docs assume you understand the problem and couch the discussion in somewhat domain specific language.
It might be interesting to me. It might even be relevant to me and I don't know it yet. The problem is I need to work really hard to get to the point of understanding that.
This is an appeal to authors of such posts: please give a motivation that provides the necessary background to understand the problem, and ideally do so in a way that a technical but non specialist reader can understand.
The idea makes sense and the work is great. Some feedback I have is that it becomes hard to try the project out when postgres is a mandatory dependency: I understand that there are scalability reasons why that choice was made, but it would be neat if sqlite was an option.
How many tasks per workflow for the 1500/sec benchmark?
looks a lot like temporal
so Temporal without the replay, Step Functions without the JSON -pretty slick
Any plans for Java?
Dotnet CIL + sqlite please?
This looks like something that will break easily with a newer version of Python or even with the use of third-party packages. It seems to couple too tightly with the user's application code.
It is too async heavy as per its readme -- this is very off-putting. Not everyone cares for async. There is no usage shown with sync code.
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How do you handle code changes for workflows already in flight? Say an instance is sleeping inside a loop for three days and someone deploys a new version of that loop. Is the compiled bytecode pinned per instance, or do you map the old position onto the new code?
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How is it different from temporal ? How code execution governance policy is handled to avoid issues like hogging face ?