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projects/flowmetal/call_cc_airflow.md

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+# An Asynchronous, Distributed Task Engine
+
+This document presents a design without reference implementation for a distributed programming system;
+sometimes called a workflow engine.
+It is intended to provide architectural level clarity allowing for the development of alternative designs or implementations as may suit.
+
+## Problem Statement
+
+In building, operating and maintaining distributed systems (many computers in concert) engineers face a tooling gap.
+
+Within the confines of a single computer, we have shells (`bash`, `csh`, `zsh`, `oil` etc.)
+and a suite of small programs which mesh together well enough for the completion of small tasks with ad-hoc automation.
+This is an enormous tooling win, as it allows small tasks to be automated at least for a time with a minimum of effort and with tools close to hand.
+
+In interacting with networks, communicating between computers is difficult with traditional tools and communication failure becomes an ever-present concern.
+Traditional automation tools such as shells are inadequate for this environment because achieving network communication is excessively difficult.
+
+In a distributed environment it cannot be assumed that a single machine can remain available to execute automation;
+This requires an approach to automation which allows for the incremental execution of single tasks at a time with provisions for relocation and recovery should failure occur.
+
+It also cannot be assumed that a single machine is sufficiently available to receive and process incoming events such as callbacks.
+A distributed system is needed to wrangle distributed systems.
+
+## Design Considerations
+
+- Timeouts are everywhere
+- Sub-Turing/boundable
+- 
+
+## Architectural Overview
+
+### Events
+Things that will happen, or time out.
+
+### Actions
+Things the workflow will do, or time out.
+
+### Bindings
+Data the workflow either was given or computed.
+
+### Conditionals
+Decisions the workflow may make.
+
+### Functions
+A convenient way to talk about fragments of control flow graph.
+
+### Tracing & Reporting