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Statecharts: hierarchical state machines

statecharts.dev

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Re: Statecharts: hierarchical state machines

#41

Post by brandensilva »

hasyimibhar wrote: post #11

I wonder if it's possible to combine statecharts with durable execution engines like Temporal, DBOS, Restate, etc. At work we use Cloudflare Workflows for managing onboarding and payment workflows. It generates flowchart diagram that is useful for quickly reasoning about what the workflow does, which I guess is what statecharts is trying to achieve.

Yeah its bothered me that workflows get all the limelight while state machines are more than capable. They just need durable execution for state charts. I think Cloudflare was going down the durable object actor model for a bit, but not sure if they abandoned that coded project.

Re: Statecharts: hierarchical state machines

#42

Post by fl4regun »

My work in PCIe IP has regularly had me involved with reading state machine (or state chart) diagrams, the PCIE link training FSM itself have multiple sub state machines e.g. for recovery, or configuration, or power savings and it was not unusual to find a physical printed copy of this diagram in the lab to help aid in debugging.

Re: Statecharts: hierarchical state machines

#43

Post by brandensilva »

davidkpiano wrote: post #9
brandensilva wrote: post #2

I've always been a fan of state machines and have hoped for their adoption to grow. Having visual understanding of state is becoming increasingly important for AI generated code you don't nearly understand as well as the human variety. It seems many still favor store based reactivity state in frontend frameworks. I contribute to it being the default so why change and because libraries like xstate are far more difficu…

The next version of XState will be much more ergonomic, with a reduced API surface area, lower learning curve, and much easier for devs (and agents) to author. But at the same time, frontier models are very good at writing XState.

I am looking forward to seeing it!

It feels bad because I know your team was working so hard pre AI to make state machines more accessible and bring such a powerful concept to the world.

I know it didn't pan out exactly, but I really want durable execution state machines that exceed workflows one day.

I keep thinking to myself can I enforce my AI layer to have some deterministic durable state machine running it and I'm not deep enough on them from a creator/author perspective to answer that question like you, but keep us posted on the changes.

Re: Statecharts: hierarchical state machines

#44

Post by c01nd01r »

davidkpiano wrote: post #6

Glad to see statecharts still getting attention! I created XState, a JS/TS library for authoring, executing, and visualizing state machines/statecharts: https://github.com/statelyai/xstate I've been working on it for 10+ years. The main thing I've learned is that statecharts are most valuable when they're treated as executable behavior, not just documentation. That doesn't mean you need to use them everywhere or mode…

With all respect to xstate, if you don't need complex nested state machines, you should check out robot3.js. The automatic TS type inference makes it pretty handy for the spots where you want a bit of state machine logic.

Re: Statecharts: hierarchical state machines

#45

Post by codethief »

MeteorMarc wrote: post #10

The title contains hierarchical, which does not come back in the post. You probably need hierarchy, otherwise state charts become unweildingly large.

It does if you click on "What is a statechart?", https://statecharts.dev/what-is-a-statechart.html .

> The primary feature of statecharts is that states can be organized in a hierarchy: A statechart is a state machine where each state in the state machine may define its own subordinate state machines, called substates. Those states can again define substates.

Re: Statecharts: hierarchical state machines

#48

Post by embedding-shape »

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #18
davidkpiano wrote: post #6

Glad to see statecharts still getting attention! I created XState, a JS/TS library for authoring, executing, and visualizing state machines/statecharts: https://github.com/statelyai/xstate I've been working on it for 10+ years. The main thing I've learned is that statecharts are most valuable when they're treated as executable behavior, not just documentation. That doesn't mean you need to use them everywhere or mode…

For the clojure folks there's https://github.com/fulcrologic/statecharts which a pretty sophisticated implementation that removes the XML requirement (particularly for executable content), yet remaining close to SCXML. XState even gets a reference in the prior art section.

And for those of us who want to avoid/are allergic to XML (& SCXML -_-), there is clj-statecharts too (https://lucywang000.github.io/clj-statecharts/docs/get-start...), I've always found it slightly more ergonomic and their codebase is a bit more intuitive and simpler than Fulcro's

Re: Statecharts: hierarchical state machines

#49

Post by davidkpiano »

c01nd01r wrote: post #44
davidkpiano wrote: post #6

Glad to see statecharts still getting attention! I created XState, a JS/TS library for authoring, executing, and visualizing state machines/statecharts: https://github.com/statelyai/xstate I've been working on it for 10+ years. The main thing I've learned is that statecharts are most valuable when they're treated as executable behavior, not just documentation. That doesn't mean you need to use them everywhere or mode…

With all respect to xstate, if you don't need complex nested state machines, you should check out robot3.js. The automatic TS type inference makes it pretty handy for the spots where you want a bit of state machine logic.

There is also @xstate/store for simple event-driven stores and atoms; just as simple as Zustand + Jotai: https://stately.ai/docs/xstate-store

Re: Statecharts: hierarchical state machines

#50

Post by miketery »

davidkpiano wrote: post #6

Glad to see statecharts still getting attention! I created XState, a JS/TS library for authoring, executing, and visualizing state machines/statecharts: https://github.com/statelyai/xstate I've been working on it for 10+ years. The main thing I've learned is that statecharts are most valuable when they're treated as executable behavior, not just documentation. That doesn't mean you need to use them everywhere or mode…

XState is awesome, made a complex decentralized key sharing scheme a breeze.
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