cue VS strictyaml

I'm continuing to work on https://concise-encoding.org which is a new security-conscious ad-hoc encoding format to replace JSON/XML and friends. I've been at it for 3 years so far and am close to a release.

In a nutshell:

- Edit in text, transmit in binary. One can be seamlessly converted to the other, but binary is far more efficient for processing, storage and transmission, while text is better for humans to read and edit (which happens far less often than the other things).

- Secure by design: Everything is tightly specced and accounted for so that there aren't differences between implementations that can be exploited to compromise your system. https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

- Real type support because coercing everything into strings sucks (and is another security risk and source of incompatibilities).

XML had a good run but was replaced by JSON which was a big improvement. JSON also had a good run but it's time for it to retire now that the landscape has changed even further: Security and efficiency are the desires of today, and JSON provides neither.

I've got the spec nailed down and can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel for the reference implementation in golang. I still need to come up with a system for schemas, but I'm hoping that https://cuelang.org will fit the bill.

Has anyone taken a look at Cue who can share any experiences?

https://cuelang.org/

It's mentioned on the site as an alternative to Yaml. Recently watched (~half of) this intro to it: https://youtu.be/fR_yApIf6jU

the most interesting summary explanation of cue lang and its differences is from a bug filing - https://github.com/cuelang/cue/issues/33

>CUE is a bit different from the languages used in linguistics and more tailored to the general configuration issue as we've seen it at Google. But under the hood it adheres strictly to the concepts and principles of these approaches and we have been careful not to make the same mistakes made in BCL (which then were copied in all its offshoots). It also means that CUE can benefit from 30 years of research on this topic. For instance, under the hood, CUE uses a first-order unification algorithm, allowing us to build template extractors based on anti-unification (see issue #7 and #15), something that is not very meaningful or even possible with languages like BCL and Jsonnet.

I agree with you. Personally, I think Cue is much better than either YAML, TOML or JSON because it adds the concept of types to the idea of describing configuration.

true, but the tooling and workflow remains the same.

Not sure of any tool that could abstract the details sufficiently to be widely adopted. There is just too much nuance in cloud config.

I'm exploring using CUE (https://cuelang.org) to define TF resources, exporting as JSON for TF. So far it's much nicer

NestedText already is the way I use YAML; everything is intepreted as a string. I have some trust in my YAML parser to not mangle most strings. I could use NestedText, but users would be unfamiliar with it, and IIRC the only parsers are in Python. But then I could use StrictYaml too https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml

you can stick to a subset of YAML syntax (e.g. strictYAML)

YAML stands for "YAML Ain’t Markup Language" - this is known as a recursive acronym. YAML is often used for writing configuration files. It’s human readable, easy to understand and can be used with other programming languages. Although YAML is commonly used in many disciplines, it has received criticism on the amoutn of whitespace .yml files have, difficulty in editing, and complexity of the standard. Despite the criticism, properly using YAML ensures that you can reproduce the results of a project and makes sure that the virtual environment packages play nicely with system packages. (If you're looking for another way to share environments there are other alternatives to YAML which include StrictYAML (a type-safe YAML parser) and NestedText)

The example you linked provides this as an example of a YAML document that he wants his format to support.

That safe subset exists and is implemented in a number of languages. It is called strict-yaml: https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/

StrictYAML\ (33 comments)

To me those are in the category of "nice to have", and the problem is that every developer has different preferences for these [1] [2]. But the main features of StrictYaml, like supporting comments and less syntactic noise, I think are pretty uncontroversial, and perhaps it's worth it to get people to switch over for those alone. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be a significant enough improvement over JSON, and I'd say those two features are more than enough

[1]: https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml/issues/37

[2]: https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml/issues/38