dhall-aws-cloudformation VS go-jsonnet

I have been writing a fair amount of Dhall using autogenerated CloudFormation bindings ( https://github.com/jcouyang/dhall-aws-cloudformation/ ). It is a fantastic way to reduce boilerplate and factor out recurring blobs. My main frustration is that the type checker is not smart enough (or maybe the type system is undecidable?) - every time you want to use a polymorphic function, you must pass in the type parameters yourself (this is also true for empty lists and `None`). This makes simple FP idioms extremely noisy, to the point where you're better off writing longhand. In a language that's meant to be alleviating YAML/JSON boilerplate.

It's still a massive improvement, but it could be so much better if the typechecker was smarter.

> jsonnet seemed like a great idea to me, but I've experienced extremely low performance.

Although each implementation of jsonnet has some quirks, take a look at (scala-based) sjsonnet^1 or go-jsonnet^2 for improved performance. We use go-jsonnet because of some issues we had with the scala version - but it does seem to be the fastest by a large margin.

There's also a Rust version^3 that claims to be the fastest yet^4, but I haven't experimented with it at all.

[1]: https://github.com/databricks/sjsonnet

[2]: https://github.com/google/go-jsonnet/

[3]: https://github.com/CertainLach/jrsonnet

[4]: https://gist.github.com/CertainLach/5770d7ad4836066f8e0bd91e...

While I never wrote one, there are some good examples out there beyond the Go compiler itself. Have a look at the Benthos bloblang one (which is quite simple): https://github.com/Jeffail/benthos/tree/master/internal/bloblang and the go-jsonnet VM one (which is more complex): https://github.com/google/go-jsonnet