cuezel VS earthly

I played with a similar idea a while ago: https://github.com/ecordell/cuezel/ (cuezel as in: "Bazel but with CUE"), but I was never sure that what I was doing was in the spirit of CUE.

CUE pushes nondeterminism into "_tool.cue"[0] files that are allowed to do things like IO and run external processes. Tool files scratch a similar itch to Makefiles, but they lack an integrated plugin system like Bazel (hence why I played with the idea of CUE + Bazel).

With Dagger you seem to be restricted to the set of things that the dagger tool can interpret just with like my Cuezel tool you are limited to what I happened to implement.

In CUE `_tool` files you are also limited to the set of things that the tool builtins provide, but the difference is that you know that the rest of the CUE program is deterministic/pure (everything not in a _tool file).

There's clearly value in tooling that reads CUE definitions, and dagger is the first commercial interest in CUE that I've seen, which is exciting.

But I'm most interested in some CUE-interpreter meta-tool that would allow you to import cue definitions + their interpreters and version them together, but for use in `_tool` files to keep the delineation clear. Maybe this is where dagger is heading? (if so it wasn't clear from the docs)

[0]: https://pkg.go.dev/cuelang.org/[email protected]/pkg/tool

Also CACHE keyword, for cache mounts. Makes incremental tools like compilers work well in the context of dockerfiles and layer caches.

That can extend beyond just producing docker iamges as well. Under the covers the CACHE keyword is how lib/rust in Earthly makes building Rust artifacts in CI faster.

https://github.com/earthly/earthly/issues/1399

earthly

A few of us will be around to answer questions if anyone has any. I myself worked only worked on the chmod feature which was pretty trivial.

https://github.com/earthly/earthly/pull/1821

[2] https://github.com/earthly/earthly/releases/tag/v0.7.0

# cat Makefile BIN_PATH = $(shell pwd)/bin $(shell mkdir $(BIN_PATH) &>/dev/null) EARTHLY = $(BIN_PATH)/earthly earthly: ifeq (,$(wildcard $(EARTHLY))) curl -L https://github.com/earthly/earthly/releases/download/v0.6.23/earthly-linux-amd64 -o $(EARTHLY) chmod +x $(EARTHLY) endif

I started to bring awareness to the Earthfiles goofy license, but it seems they've switched to MPL! https://github.com/earthly/earthly/releases/tag/v0.6.15

The (unfortunately named) Dagger is also an entry into that space: https://github.com/dagger/dagger#readme (Apache 2)

- https://github.com/earthly/earthly/tree/main/analytics

Another *monster* difference is that Dagger is (at least currently) Apache 2: https://github.com/dagger/dagger/blob/v0.2.4/LICENSE but Earthly went with BSL: https://github.com/earthly/earthly/blob/v0.6.12/LICENSE

That means I'm more likely to submit bugs and patches to Dagger, and I won't touch Earthly

Example build steps for a go application