notes.txt

Notes for future work
-----------------------

Breakpoints, pausing, etc: create a common "wait" function.  Arguments describe
the event (e.g., starting action for node X).  In pause mode, it checks a
condition and decides whether to wait.  In "step" mode, it decrements a
semaphore.  In normal mode, it does nothing.)  Could add CLI tool that runs up
to a breakpoint and exits (optionally dumps log).  Could then add a "step"
version.

Subsagas and recovery: this might "just work" if saga actions that
create subsagas were idempotent.  But I don't think they are today.  Maybe
if we first-class `ActionSaga`, the framework can ensure that this is
done idempotently.  Relatedly, if we add policies around whether each node has
an "undo" action, for this type of node, we might need that policy to differ
depending on the ActionSaga (and not the Saga behind it).

Static typing in the construction and execution of the graph:

- Probably: this isn't so much input/output for each function, but a set of
  state depended-on by the function and a set of state produced by the
  function.  (The difference is that the input of one does not need to
  match the output of the previous one, like I was previously assuming).
- starting to see how a macro could allow you to say field X has type Y and
  insert into the beginning of your function the appropriate calls to
  lookup(), though that still wouldn't be statically type-checked.
- Would one piece of this be to use macros on the action functions that
  also generate input and output types specific to that function?  Would
  they also need to generate glue code from previous and subsequent nodes?
- I think we want the Graph data structure to erase the specific
  input/output types as we do today.  But maybe when it's still in the
  builder stage, we keep track of these types so that we can fail at
  compile time when constructing an invalid graph.

Even if we skip the static typing: the interface for constructing a saga DAG
feels like it needs work.