jk VS boa

People have tried: https://github.com/jkcfg/jk

But yeah I agree. The thing is, if all you need is robust determinism why do you need a full functional language with currying and other complex concepts?

Google had the same problem for Bazel, and their solution (Starlark) is way easier to understand.

If I were writing a build system today (and I did just write one actually to test out some ideas) I would use Typescript for the language with something like jk to provide hermeticity. Typescript has many advantages, especially over Python, but mainly:

It's possible to sandbox most languages, and with some work you can probably make them deterministic too.

Here's an example: https://github.com/jkcfg/jk

That beats having to learn an entirely new language.

Maybe Javascript? A lot of web tools support Javascript config files. There's this nice-looking effort to provide a hermetic execution environment for them: https://github.com/jkcfg/jk and if you use Typescript you get an extremely good static type system too. Plus the language is already very well known with loads of tool support and documentation.

Definitely what I would use today.

If you think "but I need conditionals and file inclusion and ..." then maybe consider just allowing a full programming language instead. Someone pointed me to jk which looks like it is heading in the right direction, except that it outputs YAML by default for some insane reason.

You may be interested in jk. If you don't want to use a special purpose configuration language (jsonnet, cue, dhall, etc), this is a nice alternative that uses js in a hermetic runtime (but see their open issues for progress on that). They seem to also be adding native typescript support so you could even have type checking built-in.

boa

Yeah, pretty much. I'm not sure if we're gonna need to implement Static Shapes first but at least we need to make it possible to separate codeblocks from contexts for this to be feasible.

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I have great news

I already use it in my project to run some parts of the youtube js player. I must say it was broken on one version of the player because of a generated regex inside (more on the issue), but definitely recommending.

I would be curious how much effort it would be to swap boa for V8 to have an all Rust runtime :) If it's not meant to be a production-ready project anyways.

We'd love to see these benchmarks too! We have an open issue to set-up these benchmarks: https://github.com/boa-dev/boa/issues/1924

Although you probably could use it for something else, Boa[1] is a good demonstration of this (it uses the GC crate, but the same principle probably applies).

[1]: https://github.com/boa-dev/boa