nickel
dhall-lang
nickel | dhall-lang | |
---|---|---|
46 | 113 | |
2,137 | 4,133 | |
2.1% | 0.2% | |
9.5 | 6.0 | |
7 days ago | 2 months ago | |
Rust | Dhall | |
MIT License | BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License |
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nickel
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Nix – A One Pager
So, its key features are:
1. domain-specific: designed for conveniently creating and composing derivations. This reason alone already justifies a new language, or an embedded domain-specific language (such as the Guile/Scheme for guix), or a mix of both (Starlark, the build language of Bazel embedded in a restricted Python-variant).
2. purely functional: this ties well into the philosophical backing of Nix the package manager, which aims to be purely functional, also known as hermeticity in other build systems (Bazel).
3. lazily evaluated: similar to other build systems (including Bazel), so that you can build only what you need on demand.
4. dynamically typed: this one is controversial. Being dynamically typed—in other words, not developing a type system—gets Nix out of the door first. But users often complain about the lack of proper types and modularity. There are experiments to address this, such as Nickel (https://github.com/tweag/nickel).
It is understandable that a one-pager may not have space for the whys.
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10 Ways for Kubernetes Declarative Configuration Management
Nickel:Nickel is a straightforward configuration language aimed at automatically generating static configuration files. Essentially, it's akin to JSON with the addition of functions and types.
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Show HN: Togomak – declarative pipeline orchestrator based on HCL and Terraform
Also look at nickel which is an evolution of nix. It's my favorite in this space.
nickel-lang.org
https://github.com/tweag/nickel
- Show HN: Flake schemas – teaching Nix about your flake outputs
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What config format do you prefer?
Or this https://github.com/tweag/nickel
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Nickel 1.0
Nickel is a programming language. While HCL is just a configuration format, so not really comparable.
Here's a comparison with similar tools: https://github.com/tweag/nickel#comparison
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Announcing Nickel 1.0, a configuration language written in (and usable from) Rust
As for 'providence', I suppose you meant provenance :) it's been delayed because this was less critical for 1.0 to decide on or to implement (as it: it doesn't break backward compatibility in any way to add this feature in the short term), but this is very much on the roadmap: Issue #235. That's a must-have in a language with merging like Nickel.
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Rewrite it in Rust: Kubernetes
Have you considered using a different language for templating? this could be a BIG selling point. Some good ones are cue-lang (though I haven't seen support for rust), kcl or nickel-lang.
- Nickel v1.0.0
- Design rationale for the Nickel configuration language
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.
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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://jsonnet.org/
- https://nickel-lang.org/
- https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/language/index.html
- https://dhall-lang.org/
- (insert many more here, probably including Pkl)
- Why the fuck are we templating YAML? (2019)
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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...
[3]: https://dhall-lang.org/
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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 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].
[1] https://dhall-lang.org/
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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
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Home Blog Better configuration languages – A talk about Dhall [video]
And to checkout Dhall: https://dhall-lang.org/
What are some alternatives?
rnix-lsp - WIP Language Server for Nix! [maintainer=@aaronjanse]
cue - CUE has moved to https://github.com/cue-lang/cue
nixos - My NixOS Configurations
jsonnet - Jsonnet - The data templating language
nix-gui - Use NixOS Without Coding
cue - The home of the CUE language! Validate and define text-based and dynamic configuration
nix-doc - An interactive Nix documentation tool providing a CLI for function search, a Nix plugin for docs in the REPL, and a ctags implementation for Nix script
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.
AppImageKit - Package desktop applications as AppImages that run on common Linux-based operating systems, such as RHEL, CentOS, openSUSE, SLED, Ubuntu, Fedora, debian and derivatives. Join #AppImage on irc.libera.chat
jsonlogic - Go Lang implementation of JsonLogic
nix - Nix, the purely functional package manager