One Workflow, Many Lanes: Completing ByteChef's Flow Controls

TL;DR: ByteChef's workflow editor now exposes the full set of flow controls : alongside the familiar Condition , Branch , and Loop , you can drop Parallel , Fork/Join , Each , Map , and Subflow onto the canvas. That means workflows that fan out over lists, run independent steps concurrently, and call other workflows as reusable building blocks - all visually, no custom code. This closes out issue #1057 , one of the longest-running feature checklists in the ByteChef repository. Some GitHub issues are essays. Issue #1057 is a checklist: [x] condition [x] loop [x] each [x] branch [x] map [x] parallel [x] fork-join [x] subflow Each of those checkboxes is a flow control - what the workflow engine internally calls a task dispatcher . A regular component does work: it sends the email, queries the database, calls the API. A task dispatcher never does work itself. It decides which tasks run, when, how many times, and with what data - it directs traffic. We wrote about the first half of that checklist in our guide to flow controls : Condition routes on true/false, Branch picks one of several paths based on an expression, and Loop repeats steps over a list. Those cover decisions and repetition . This post is about the second half - the controls that cover concurrency and composition . They've been running behind a feature flag while we hardened them one checkbox at a time; with the list complete, the flag is going away and the full set is available to everyone. Why Sequential Isn't Always Enough Every workflow starts as a straight line: trigger, then step one, then step two. That's the right default - it's easy to reason about, and each step can use the output of the one before it. But real processes aren't always lines: Onboarding a customer means creating a CRM record, provisioning an account, and notifying the sales channel - three things that don't depend on each other, so why wait? Enriching 200 leads one at a time takes 200× as long as enriching them all at once. Five di