pulumi-terraform-bridge VS dhall-lang

GA: automatic token mapping and aliasing in the bridge, which we're now using to simplify the resources.go file in bridged providers

Yes, pulumi is just wrapping terraform[1]. So you need to understand both the quirks of that and the quirks of pulumi. And I'm lazy so I just want to deal with one quirk at the time.

[1] https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-terraform-bridge

After digging, I saw python libraries in my venv directory that is related to Terraform Bridge and the tool that was used to generate code - https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-terraform-bridge

They have an open source tool that translates the TF providers into Pulumi providers, so people could continue to build updated providers - https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-terraform-bridge

> If Pulumi didn't bless it, it doesn't exist in Pulumi's world.

That has not been my experience. I have personally ported a Sentry TF provider into Pulumi, and I will grant you that their docs and examples are bordering on active user hatred for exercising the process, but it does work:

https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-terraform-bridge#adapting-a...

https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-tf-provider-boilerplate#rea...

What mystifies me about that situation is that I do actually appreciate the amount of silliness that is required to avoid using Pulumi cloud: they are not financially incentivized to make that easy, but I'd guess a lot more folks would nope right out if they didn't make it possible

However, I would think they'd want to make ingesting a TF provider into Pulumi as smooth and reliable as possible, so they don't have people close their browser tab when they don't find a supported provider for Pulumi but it exists in TF

For provisioning infrastructure in AWS, there are other tools besides those provided by AWS themselves. This includes Terraform and Pulumi. Both of these are not tied to any particular public cloud provider, or not even to public cloud providers only. Any kind of Software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider that can provide some service or infrastructure via programming interfaces can in theory be provisioned by these tools. Terraform has a long list of providers, and Pulumi can use Terraform providers in addition to its providers.

I think they might use their (pulumi-terraform-bridge)[https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-terraform-bridge] to generate some of their provider code from the corresponding Terraform providers? (This page mentioned some of their "most interesting providers" are created like this)[https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/vs/terraform/#using-terraform-providers].

Fail to see how this is any different than Dhall (https://dhall-lang.org/) other than it produces plists too.

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)

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/

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.

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...

> 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/

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

And to checkout Dhall: https://dhall-lang.org/