jk
dhall-lang
Our great sponsors
jk | dhall-lang | |
---|---|---|
9 | 113 | |
399 | 4,129 | |
0.3% | 0.5% | |
0.0 | 6.0 | |
over 1 year ago | about 2 months ago | |
Go | Dhall | |
Apache License 2.0 | BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
jk
- Jsonnet – The Data Templating Language
-
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.
-
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:
-
The Perfect Configuration Format? Try TypeScript
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.
-
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.
-
What is the difference between JSON and YAML?
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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)
- Why the fuck are we templating YAML? (2019)
-
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...
-
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.
-
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...
-
What Is the Point of Decidability
> Where practical is in the sense of an engineer (or in their terms, a CS practitioner),
Configuration processing. E.g. I'd like my yamls to be decidable, though I'd settle for guaranteed to halt[1].
-
What Is Wrong with TOML?
Maybe you'd like jsonnet: https://jsonnet.org/
I find it particularly useful for configurations that often have repeated boilerplate, like ansible playbooks or deploying a bunch of "similar-but" services to kubernetes (with https://tanka.dev).
Dhall is also quite interesting, with some tradeoffs: https://dhall-lang.org/
A few years ago I did a small comparison by re-implementing one of my simpler ansible playbooks: https://github.com/retzkek/ansible-dhall-jsonnet
- Show HN: FlakeHub – Discover and publish Nix flakes
-
Home Blog Better configuration languages – A talk about Dhall [video]
And to checkout Dhall: https://dhall-lang.org/
What are some alternatives?
vm2 - Advanced vm/sandbox for Node.js
cue - CUE has moved to https://github.com/cue-lang/cue
pants - The Pants Build System
jsonnet - Jsonnet - The data templating language
hof - Framework that joins data models, schemas, code generation, and a task engine. Language and technology agnostic.
cue - The home of the CUE language! Validate and define text-based and dynamic configuration
FlatBuffers - FlatBuffers: Memory Efficient Serialization Library
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
starlark-go - Starlark in Go: the Starlark configuration language, implemented in Go
nix-gui - Use NixOS Without Coding