Pulumi VS dark

If you are following this blog series, you should already know the benefits of using Terraform to define and deploy your AWS resources and configuration. Other IaC solutions such as AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK, and Pulumi work the same way but differs in the programming or configuration language.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an important part of any true hosting operation in the public cloud. Each of these platforms has their own IaC solution, e.g. AWS CloudFormation. But they also support popular open-source IaC tools like Pulumi or Terraform. A category of tools that also needs to be discussed is API gateways and other app-specific load balancers. There are applications for internal consumption, which can be called microservices if you have a lot of them. And often microservices use advanced networking options such as a service mesh instead of just the native private network offered by a VPC.

Pulumi — Modern infrastructure as a code platform that allows you to use familiar programming languages and tools to build, deploy, and manage cloud infrastructure.

Another alternative to writing an operator would be to rely on kustomize or https://www.pulumi.com/.

Pulumi

Would it make sense to say Dagger is to Pulumi [1], as Terraform is to Togomak?

[1]: https://www.pulumi.com/

Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Define your infrastructure using code (IaC) to automate the provisioning of resources such as virtual machines, load balancers, and databases. Tools like Terraform, Pulumi, and AWS CloudFormation can help.

This example uses Pulumi which allows you to write the IaC in Python.

What are your opinions on the decision to the change to BSL? Will you move to use the cloud service, keep using current version, the open source fork, switch to pulumi or bicep?

Yes. Darklang was originally in OCaml using js_of_ocaml, and we ported it to F# using Blazor (https://github.com/darklang/dark/tree/main/backend/src/Wasm). It works.

We found that in dotnet 6, the code was much slower, with long startup times and a much bigger download, than in js_of_ocaml. It also had a lot of issues in running in a Webworker, which wasn't the case for js_of_ocaml.

In dotnet 7, the webworker issues are better and AOT is easier, so startup is faster. Download sizes are still bad, and it's still slower than js_of_ocaml.

However, dotnet allows almost any code to run in WASM, which js_of_ocaml had large limitations. This meant a decent chunk of functionality had to be worked around to make separate js vs native targets, which also was a massive pain and took a long time. Dune's virtual targets wasn't ready at the time - I think we were one of the test cases for it.

First it was probably Dark. They made a lot of noise some years ago, but then I never heard of them again (looking at their current website, looks like they moved on to AI now, obviously).

Specifically Unison and Dark?

Reminds me of Darklang. Personally, I don't think vendoring cloud services into a language is going to be beneficial. I'm curious how the language deals with vendor updates. Do I have to upgrade the language then? If so, I see a lot conflicts coming from this. Then it comes down to Javascript or HCL, the HCL bit makes me think that the below statement is not as truthy as it is on the surface:

I wish I could remember what took me to YCombinator's website on the 10th of October, 2022. That was when I first heard about Wasp and another language called DarkLang. After I learned about Wasp, I was intrigued and curious to know how it works, which led me to join the discord server the next day.

Some languages that try to integrate an HTTP server and a database:

Ur/Web: http://impredicative.com/ur/

Dark (Darklang): https://darklang.com/

There are others in this space I did not assess like Encore, Shuttle, Modal, and Dark. These were not assessed for the sake of time. If you're interested in IfC, I encourage you to take a look at these others.

Oh, finally! I was waiting to build my serverless CRUD webapp in Dark (OCaml + JavaScript and Fsharp?) until they had support for returning negative numbers on a GET request!

The author should check out Dark Lang: https://darklang.com/

Darklang - Main project license does not appear to be Open Source, very limited rights provided.