Obelisk 0.37 ships first-class JavaScript support for all three component types — activities, workflows, and webhook endpoints — running inside a fine-grained permission sandbox. It also introduces the Deployment concept with hot redeploy, and built-in cron scheduling.
Obelisk 0.35 introduces workflow replay for debugging and version migration, execution pausing, persistent log storage, and streamlined component management with GitHub release support.
Obelisk 0.32 introduces cooperative cancellation for workflows and activities, a new WebAPI with multi-format support, and PostgreSQL support for multi-node deployments and high availability.
One of the big strengths of Rust is its use of automatic memory management. When a value gets out of
scope, the compiler automatically calls its destructor and frees the memory. During my work on
graceful shutdown I have stumbled on a less known interaction between scopes and the _ wildcard
pattern that can lead to surprising order of destructors.
Obelisk and DBOS are both open-source durable workflow engines.
Let's see how they compare in terms of ease of use, nondeterminism prevention and performance.
I will go through the Learn DBOS Java tutorial and compare it with Rust version of the same code written for Obelisk. I chose Java because of familiarity, however the library has just been released so the code is still quite young. On the Obelisk side, Rust is the obvious choice as it has the best performance and tooling.