nickel | jk | |
---|---|---|
46 | 9 | |
2,137 | 399 | |
2.1% | 0.0% | |
9.5 | 0.0 | |
7 days ago | over 1 year ago | |
Rust | Go | |
MIT License | Apache License 2.0 |
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.
nickel
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
What config format do you prefer?
Or this https://github.com/tweag/nickel
-
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
-
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.
-
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
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.
What are some alternatives?
rnix-lsp - WIP Language Server for Nix! [maintainer=@aaronjanse]
vm2 - Advanced vm/sandbox for Node.js
nixos - My NixOS Configurations
dhall-lang - Maintainable configuration files
nix-gui - Use NixOS Without Coding
pants - The Pants Build System
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
hof - Framework that joins data models, schemas, code generation, and a task engine. Language and technology agnostic.
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
FlatBuffers - FlatBuffers: Memory Efficient Serialization Library
nix - Nix, the purely functional package manager
jsonnet - Jsonnet - The data templating language