enctool VS cue

https://concise-encoding.org/ is looking for help!

I'm planning to release v1 later this year, and there are still a number of things to finish:

- Finish upgrading the portable testing rig (whereby the tests are defined in CTE format so that they can be run against any implementation).

- Bring the Antlr grammar files up to date and make sure they're as easy as possible to build CTE parsers from.

- Add schema validation support to https://github.com/kstenerud/enctool for Concise Encoding documents (using https://cuelang.org/)

- Critiques on the format itself (passages that are unclear or don't make sense, features that shouldn't be there or need more work, etc)

- Implementations in other languages & platforms (CBE is more important to start because one can always use enctool to convert between CBE and CTE).

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 because it's a bit out of date.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

Yes, that is exactly the aim of the binary format. It has a few basic concepts like being byte-oriented, 1-byte headers for most things, ULEB128 encoding for large values, same chunking mechanism for all arrays and string-likes, same "open/close" mechanism for all container types, etc.

The binary codec is VERY simple, and can be trivially implemented for an async-safe or otherwise constrained environment. In fact, I expect that many implementations will only build the binary codec, since you could just pass any recorded binary data through enctool [1] or whatever to see or manipulate its contents as a human. An embedded system would have no need to process the text format.

[1]https://github.com/kstenerud/enctool

If you are in a situation where you have a backend and you want to expose an API and then you would eventually want a client, you would need format specs as the starting point where server and clients are generated from that one source.

At the moment, OpenAPI with YAML is the only way to go but you can't easily split the spec into separate files as you would do any program with packages, modules and what not.

There are third party tools[0] which are archived and the libraries they depend upon are up for adoption.

In that space, either you can use something like cue language 1] or something like TypeSpec which is purpose built for this so yet, this seems like a great tool although I have not tried it yet myself.

[0]. https://github.com/APIDevTools/swagger-cli

[1]. https://cuelang.org/

EDIT: formating

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.