sprig VS skycfg

Standard Go templating seems really lacking if you come from something like Jinja. Even with libraries like https://masterminds.github.io/sprig/ (used e.g. for Helm templating) it feels hard to use.

Eleven, you'd be surprised what go template libs are out there like sprig. https://masterminds.github.io/sprig/

If you use Go templates be sure to use Sprig as well to get more usable functions.

I'd highly recommend tossing in the sprig library and depending on how you break up your templates, maybe creating a custom "include" helper instead of using the built in define/template helpers. The advantage of this is that if each template is capable of rendering itself independently, you can potentially render all of your templates in parallel.

The discoverability of golang templates is terrible, IMHO, since it's missing a "dir(locals())" equivalent and every execution environment gets to make its own rules about what pipelines/functions are exposed

Look at helm as an example: https://helm.sh/docs/chart_template_guide/function_list/ is some of them, https://helm.sh/docs/chart_template_guide/accessing_files/#p... are some others, but they also glued in some version of https://masterminds.github.io/sprig/ So, short of (a) knowing that's the case (b) having 3+ bookmarks in your favorite browser to refer to those reference pages, how would anyone know what pipelines are available?

Separately, I dooooo nooooooot understand why every joker has to invent their own new thing when we have like 50 or so templating languages already. Golang may be an outlier in that competition due to the Google Promotion Packet Effect(tm) but how they came up with `{{ range }}{{ end }}` as sane syntax is some true facepalm, to say nothing of the same landmine that ansible stepped on by not switching jinja2's default characters: `{{` is not _yaml safe_

You mentioned something about PHP. We also already have a templating language in the standard library that can be extended (commonly done with sprig).

Plopjs looks interesting and is probably not too hard to write for yourself in Go. You could add something like sprig for some useful template functions.

Not at all. It was "write a helm template using the following imaginary values in a values file". In 30 minutes, I was able to google the Kubernetes api and the sprig functions for templating, complete the assignment, fix a stupid typo the unit test caught, and spend 5 minutes trying to think of any corner cases that hidden unit tests might catch (I don't know if there were any hidden unit tests). The goal of this take-home assessment was to prove that you are not wasting an engineer's time when they call you, not to prove that you should be hired.

Support sprig in Template

They may refer to the definitive shortage of built-in functions. The template engine itself only provides the bare minimum. That's usually not a problem because of template function libraries like https://github.com/Masterminds/sprig

I can definitely sympathize here - in every context, just straight JSON/YAML configuration seems never expressive enough, but the tooling created in response always seems to come with sharp edges.

Here are some of the things I appreciate about Jsonnet:

- It evals to JSON, so even though the semantics of the language are confusing, it is reasonably easy to eval and iterate on some Jsonnet until it emits what one is expecting - and after that, it's easy to create some validation tests so that regressions don't occur.

- It takes advantage of the fact that JSON is a lowest-common-denominator for many data serialization formats. YAML is technically a superset of JSON, so valid JSON is also valid YAML. Proto3 messages have a canonical JSON representation, so JSON can also adhere to protobuf schemas. This covers most "serialized data structure" use-cases I typically encounter (TOML and HCL are outliers, but many tools that accept those also accept equivalent JSON). This means that with a little bit of build-tool duct-taping, Jsonnet can be used to generate configurations for a wide variety of tooling.

- Jsonnet is itself a superset of JSON - so those more willing to write verbose JSON than learn Jsonnet can still write JSON that someone else can import/use elsewhere. Using Jsonnet does not preclude falling back to JSON.

- The tooling works well - installing the Jsonnet VSCode plugin brings in a code formatter that does an excellent job, and rules_jsonnet[0] provides good bazel integration, if that's your thing.

I'm excited about Jsonnet because now as long as other tool authors decide to consume JSON, I can more easily abstract away their verbosity without writing a purpose-built tool (looking at you, Kubernetes) without resorting to text templating (ahem Helm). Jsonnet might just be my "one JSON-generation language to rule them all"!

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Though if Starlark is your thing, do checkout out skycfg[1]

[0] - https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_jsonnet

[1] - https://github.com/stripe/skycfg

Can you say more about what GCL does better than all of the open source ones?

Anecdotally, I've heard a lot of GCL horror stories, and many Xooglers have chosen to create things like Jsonnet or Skycfg (https://github.com/stripe/skycfg) instead.

If you’re looking at other solutions check out https://github.com/stripe/skycfg It works with Envoy and lots of other things that support protobuf configs

This is good and there are several other options like https://github.com/stripe/skycfg#why-use-skycfg to add full language support (using Go or python for ex) to configurations.