It’s not a hidden knowledge that many assignments are not atomic and we can face the word tearing. They are mostly related to CPU word length, synchronization, concurrency, etc. However, things can be much worse when we’re dealing with interpreted languages or languages with no strict schema. In these languages, a “regular” assignment can also … Continue reading Non-atomic assignments in Python

This is the fifth part of the State Machine Executor series. For your convenience you can find other parts in the table of contents in State Machine Executor Part 1 — Introduction Being able to describe side effects instead of executing them may sound great, but it has one significant drawback – the side effects … Continue reading State Machine Executor Part 5 — Streaming

This is the fourth part of the State Machine Executor series. For your convenience you can find other parts in the table of contents in State Machine Executor Part 1 — Introduction Let’s discuss how to improve reliability of our state machines. How machines are executed In part 1, we defined the contract for triggering … Continue reading State Machine Executor Part 4 — Timeouts, exceptions, suspending

This is the third part of the State Machine Executor series. For your convenience you can find other parts in the table of contents in State Machine Executor Part 1 — Introduction Our state machines can execute side-effectful actions. But how do they read results? One approach is to write the result back to the … Continue reading State Machine Executor Part 3 — Actions and history

This is the second part of the State Machine Executor series. For your convenience you can find other parts in the table of contents in State Machine Executor Part 1 — Introduction The code we implemented in the last part is unable to recover from machine crashes. If the process dies midway, we need to … Continue reading State Machine Executor Part 2 — Fault tolerance