A Pipeline can wait three days for an input approval, or run a 40-minute test suite while you upgrade a plugin and restart the controller, and carry on where it stopped. No ordinary Groovy program can do that, because its state lives on a JVM thread's stack. Pipeline gets there by running your Jenkinsfile through an unusual interpreter, and most of Pipeline's surprising rules follow from that one design decision.
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Surviving Restarts
How Pipelines Survive Restarts Under the Hood