The best workflow engine is a programming language

Workflow SDK is a Vercel-developed, open-source TypeScript framework for durable execution that aims to let developers write long-running, stateful workflows as ordinary code rather than manually defined task graphs or separately managed worker systems. It uses directives such as “use workflow” for orchestration and “use step” for durable side-effecting operations, while supporting normal language constructs including awaits, branching, parallelism, retries, loops, and error handling. The SDK replaces separate workflow signals, queries, and updates with hooks, including webhooks that can pause a workflow until an external response arrives. Designed as a library rather than a proprietary orchestration platform, it can run on existing applications, databases, queues, and streaming systems through a pluggable “World” interface, with Postgres and Vercel-backed implementations available. The Vercel implementation is described as a stateless CRUD service, while workflow logic remains in the Apache-licensed client library. Versioning is handled on Vercel by pinning runs to their original immutable deployment, avoiding failures from code changes during in-flight executions, although other backends must implement comparable support. The project is focused on reducing the performance overhead of durable steps, with Workflow v5 reporting up to fivefold improvements and further work planned for v6.

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