cue VS concise-encoding

Where `kube.cue` sets reasonable defaults (e.g. image is /). The "cluster" runs on a mini PC in my basement, and I have a small Digital Ocean VM with a static IP acting as an ingress (networking via Tailscale). Backups to cloud storage with restic, alerting/monitoring with Prometheus/Grafana, Caddy/Tailscale for local ingress.

[1] https://www.talos.dev/

[2] https://cuelang.org/

I've been somewhat surprised that CUE bills itself as "tooling friendly" and doesn't yet have a language server- the number one bit of tooling most devs use for a particular language.

I'm assuming it's becaus CUE is still unstable?

Anyway, if others are interested in CUE's LSP work, I think https://github.com/cue-lang/cue/issues/142 is the issue to subscribe to

This is where I usually pitch in with "Have your heard of CUELang, our lord and savior?": https://cuelang.org/

- Not turing complete

CUE: The core problem CUE solves is "type checking", which is mainly used in configuration constraint verification scenarios and simple cloud native configuration scenarios.

If you really want executable configurations please consider a newer language like https://dascript.org or https://cuelang.org which provide better type safety.

1- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38030778

Markdown and XML are nice, but what about more advanced documentation formats like OpenAPI? For one recent project, I set up automatic generation of the OpenAPI docs from (much more compact and flexible) CUE definitions (https://cuelang.org/) - which has the bonus of also being able to test the API against the definitions. JetBrains has a CUE plugin, but it's really barebones (doesn't even support jumping from the usage of a schema to its definition). Of course the possibilities when generating docs are endless (just think of the various syntaxes for doc comments, embedding examples/tests in source code etc.)...

It doesn't include validators for TOML and INI, but if you're doing JSON and YAML, I would take a look at using or building upon CUE (https://cuelang.org/). It is a different take on schema definition (plus more), and is surprising terse and powerful model.

"Local time" is time zone metadata. I've written a fair bit about timekeeping, because the context of what you're capturing becomes very important: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

This is basically why I ended up rolling my own text date format for Concise Encoding: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

ISO 8601 and RFC 3339 are fine for dates in the past, but they're not great as a general time format.

This looks similar to https://concise-encoding.org/

Dogma was developed as a consequence of trying to describe Concise Binary Encoding. The CBE spec used to look like the preserves binary spec, full of hex values, tables and various ad-hoc illustrations: https://preserves.dev/preserves-binary.html

Now the CBE formal description looks like this: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/cb...

And the regular documentation looks like this: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/cb...

Dogma also does text formats (Concise Encoding has a text and binary format, so I needed a metalanguage that could do both in order to make it less jarring for a reader):

https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

Hey thanks for taking the time to critique!

I actually do have an ANTLR file that is about 90% of the way there ( https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/tree/master/an... ), so I could use those as a basis...

One thing I'm not sure about is how to define a BNF rule that says for example: "An identifier is a series of characters from unicode categories Cf, L, M, N, and these specific symbol characters". BNF feels very ASCII-centric...

It's still in the prerelease stage, but v1 will be released later this year. I'm mostly getting hits from China since they tend to be a lot more worried about security. I expect the rest of the world to catch on to the gaping security holes of JSON and friends in the next few years as the more sophisticated actors start taking advantage of them. For example https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

There are still a few things to do:

- Update enctool (https://github.com/kstenerud/enctool) to integrate https://cuelang.org so that there's at least a command line schema validator for CE.

- Update the grammar file (https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/tree/master/an...) because it's a bit out of date.

- Revamp the compliance tests to be themselves written in Concise Encoding (for example https://github.com/kstenerud/go-concise-encoding/blob/master... but I'll be simplifying the format some more). That way, we can run the same tests on all CE implementations instead of everyone coming up with their own. I'll move the test definitions to their own repo when they're done and then you can just submodule it.

I'm thinking that they should look more like:

    c1

Ugh Unicode has been the bane of my existence trying to write a text format spec. I started by trying to forbid certain characters to keep files editable and avoid Unicode rendering exploits (like hiding text, or making structured text behave differently than it looks), but in the end it became so much like herding cats that I had to just settle on https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

Basically allow everything except some separators, most control chars, and some lookalike characters (which have to be updated as more characters are added to Unicode). It's not as clean as I'd like, but it's at least manageable this way.

You might get a kick out of Concise Encoding then (shameless plug). It focuses on security and consistency of behavior.

https://concise-encoding.org/

In particular:

* How to deal with unrepresentable values: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

* Mandatory limits and security considerations: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

* Consistent error classification and processing: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

In the above example, `&a:` means mark the next object and give it symbolic identifier "a". `$a` means look up the reference to symbolic identifier "a". So this is a map whose "recusive link" key is a pointer to the map itself. How this data is represented internally by the receiver of such a document (a table, a struct, etc) is up to the implementation.

> - Time zones: ASN.1 supports ISO 8601 time types, including specification of local or UTC time.

Yes, this is the major failing of ISO 8601: They don't have true time zones. It only uses UTC offsets, which are a bad idea for so many reasons. https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

> - Bin + txt: Again, I'm unclear on what you mean here, but ASN.1 has both binary and text-based encodings

Ah cool, didn't know about those.

> - Versioned: Also a little unclear to me

The intent is to specify the exact document formatting that the decoder can expect. For example we could in theory decide make CBE version 2 a bit-oriented format instead of byte-oriented in order to save space at the cost of processing time. It would be completely unreadable to a CBE 1 decoder, but since the document starts with 0x83 0x02 instead of 0x83 0x01, a CBE 1 decoder would say "I can't decode this" and a CBE 2 decoder would say "I can decode this".

With documents versioned to the spec, we can change even the fundamental structure of the format to deal with ANYTHING that might come up in future. Maybe a new security flaw in CBE 1 is discovered. Maybe a new data type becomes so popular that it would be crazy not to include it, etc. This avoids polluting the simpler encodings with deprecated types and bloating the format.