Lately, it has been a great challenge to get into the world of durable execution. Granted, in the world of web applications we often do not need it. However, anyone who has come in contact with electronic payments, money orders, verifications - will likely encounter a need for durable execution. The juggernauts in the space are, of course, Temporal.io - with the recently emerging contender restate following in its footsteps. Both are based on the premise of sagas, controlled by a separate service. There is also DBOS and now there is also absurd and the Vercel Workflow. As it happens, meeting Bouke when I joined Cheddar has spurred my interest in Temporal. I knew someone who did work on the payments infrastructure at Uber (where Temporal came from), and intellectually the problems in the space are just very stimulating. However, as luck would have it, it would take another 2 years at Cheddar before a need would arise for actually using durable execution, in actual features. And in the course of implementing it, a few things turned out to be very invigorating indeed. So, before we go into any libraries or solutions: let’s just contemplate. However, if you are impatient (and a Rails user) - just head to the geneva_drive repo for the grand reveal.

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Durable execution systems like Temporal and Restate attempt to enable long-running workflows that can pause and resume, but face fundamental limitations because modern runtimes lack marshalable stacks. The author explores why truly serializable call stacks with handles, code versioning, and state preservation remain impractical, forcing these systems to rely on idempotency and checkpointing instead. This creates a leaky abstraction where developers must carefully manage what goes into orchestrator versus task code, handle non-deterministic values, and ensure proper rollback mechanisms—all while pretending the stack can be frozen and revived across machines.

On the way to step functions: dreams of marshalable stacks