jk
dhall-lang
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jk | dhall-lang | |
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9 | 113 | |
398 | 4,124 | |
0.0% | 1.3% | |
0.0 | 6.0 | |
about 1 year ago | 27 days ago | |
Go | Dhall | |
Apache License 2.0 | BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License |
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jk
- Jsonnet – The Data Templating Language
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The Curse of NixOS
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.
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Pants vs. Bazel: Why Pants may be the right choice for your team
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:
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The Perfect Configuration Format? Try TypeScript
Great little writeup ! After mangling YAML, HCL, JSON for years as an ops engineer, I have come to the same realisation. In fact, I have put this into practice in production pipelines by using: jkcfg[1] for the last couple of years. Two data points: 1. Zero developer support contract rate around YAML syntax and templating issues 2. High number of contributions in our private typescript configuration library from developers. Using typescript as an ops frontend has made operations a lot more approachable to folks.
Recently I took what learnt in the last 2 years using jkcfg/typescript and taken it to Deno in form of an opinionated port of jkcfg called: dxcfg[2]. Its early days, but I would bet on Deno/typescript for future ops configuration.
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.
Why? The only reasons I can think of are:
* They can be non-deterministic (do a different thing each time you run them).
* They can be non-hermetic (access stuff in the environment you don't know about).
* They can do naughty security things.
* You can't present GUIs of them because they aren't declarative.
All but the last one don't exclude programming languages. Here's an interesting project to make hermetic deterministic Javascript (Typescript support is planned):
For the sorts of places where you don't have a GUI for the settings anyway (which is the common case) I think it makes loads of sense. It beats making the kind of declarative programming languages you see in YAML files.
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Cue: A new language for data validation
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.
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Boa release v0.13
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.
dhall-lang
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Apple releases Pkl – onfiguration as code language
Fail to see how this is any different than Dhall (https://dhall-lang.org/) other than it produces plists too.
Well, Dhall provides something between JSON and a Turing complete language that can make a lot of configuration much quicker to write, if you can hack the functional syntax.
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Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration
Kubernetes config is a decent example. I had ChatGPT generate a representative silly example -- the content doesn't matter so much as the structure:
https://gist.github.com/cstrahan/528b00cd5c3a22e3d8f057bb1a7...
Now consider 100s (if not 1000s) of such files.
I haven't given Pkl an in depth look yet, but I can say that the Industry Standard™ of "simple YAML" + string substitution (with delicate, error prone indentation -- since YAML is indentation sensitive) is easily beat by any of:
- https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/language/index.html
- (insert many more here, probably including Pkl)
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Why the fuck are we templating YAML? (2019)
Indeed why? However the conclusion I have is not to use JSON but to use a type safe configuration language that can express my intent much better making illegal states impossible. One example of such lang is Dhall.
Throwing in a plug for https://dhall-lang.org/
> Dhall is a programmable configuration language that you can think of as: JSON + functions + types + imports
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Is Htmx Just Another JavaScript Framework?
There are underpowered languages / tools, that can only solve a problem for which they are intended poorly. But not all limited tools are like that.
Say, eBPF is prominently not Turing-complete, which allows to guarantee that a eBPF program terminates, and even how soon. Still eBPF is hugely useful in its area.
Or, say, regular expressions are limited to regular languages; in particular, they famously [1] cannot process recursive structures, like trees. Still tools like grep / ag / rg are mightily useful.
Yes, I agree that YAML is underpowered for proper k8s configuration! But it's also too powerful for its own good in other aspects [2]. I wish Google used Dhall [3] or their own purely functional config language (FCL? I already forgot the name) instead of YAML; sadly, they did not.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/223424
[2]: https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-fr...
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10 Ways for Kubernetes Declarative Configuration Management
Dhall: Dhall is a programmable configuration language that combines features like JSON, functions, types, and import capabilities. Its style leans towards functional programming, so if you're familiar with functional-style languages such as Haskell, you might find Dhall to be quite intuitive.
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Berry is a ultra-lightweight dynamically typed embedded scripting language
I've been thinking along these lines but more 'strongly validated' than statically typed in the sense that you'd be better off being able to load the entire config and then produce a list of problems (and should be able to offer good editor support if done correctly).
Though https://dhall-lang.org/ demonstrates that you can statically type quite a lot of configuration to great advantage, which appears to be programmatically embeddable in multiple languages per https://docs.dhall-lang.org/howtos/How-to-integrate-Dhall.ht...
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What Is Wrong with TOML?
I agree, I quite like https://dhall-lang.org/ for that reason. It strikes a good balance between features and being a config language.
What are some alternatives?
cue - CUE has moved to https://github.com/cue-lang/cue
jsonnet - Jsonnet - The data templating language
cue - The home of the CUE language! Validate and define text-based and dynamic configuration
terraform - Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is a source-available tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.
jsonlogic - Go Lang implementation of JsonLogic
nix-gui - Use NixOS Without Coding
Pulumi - Pulumi - Infrastructure as Code in any programming language. Build infrastructure intuitively on any cloud using familiar languages 🚀
zig - General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.
lua-patterns - Exposing Lua string patterns to Rust
vm2 - Advanced vm/sandbox for Node.js
wasp - The fastest way to develop full-stack web apps with React & Node.js.
edn - Extensible Data Notation