starlark
jsonnet
starlark | jsonnet | |
---|---|---|
22 | 48 | |
2,238 | 6,762 | |
1.9% | 0.5% | |
4.1 | 8.4 | |
3 days ago | 8 days ago | |
Starlark | Jsonnet | |
Apache License 2.0 | Apache License 2.0 |
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starlark
- (The) Starlark Language
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Apple releases Pkl – onfiguration as code language
The implementations and users page mentioned above:
https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark/blob/master/users.md
- Language design of Starlark (compared to Python)
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10 Ways for Kubernetes Declarative Configuration Management
Starlark: Starlark is a language for describing build transformations, inspired by Python, but with features that make it suitable for embedding in software like Bazel. It can be used for configuration generation due to its capability for deterministic evaluation and expressing complex build transformations.
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How Big Should a Programming Language Be?
In the design of Starlark (https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark), I often had to push back against new feature requests to keep the language simple. I explicitly listed simplicity as a design goal.i
Of course, the scope of the language is not the same as general purpose languages, but there's always pressure from the users to add more things. I also think many people underestimate the cost of adding new features: it's not just about adding the code in every compiler/interpreter, specifying every edge-case in a spec, updating all the tooling for the language and writing tutorials; it's also a cost on everyone who will have to read any of the code.
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Launch HN: Moonrepo (YC W23) – Open-source build system
one of the benefits of starlark (unlike python): "Starlark is suitable for use in highly parallel applications. An application may invoke the Starlark interpreter concurrently from many threads, without the possibility of a data race, because shared data structures become immutable due to freezing." from https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark/blob/master/spec.md - it's not python, you can't do recursion (!) and it's more limited (you can't read a file in bazel, and parse it, you have to make this operation into the graph somehow)
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When to use Bazel?
You can do the same in Bazel which uses Starlark for its BUILD files. Starlark is a dialect of Python so it makes it super easy to work with.
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[P] Docker alternative for AI/ML
Make sense. We do not use Python actually, the build language is starlark, which is the config lang used by bazel. https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark
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The Dhall Configuration Language
Have you seen Starlark? It's not too far from that, but safer in a number of ways: https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark
- What change should Python 4 bring, in your opinion?
jsonnet
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A Reasonable Configuration Language
jsonnet[1] and kapitan[2] are the tools I currently use. Their learning curve is not optimal (and I tried to contribute to smoothen it with a jsonnet course[3] and a 'get started wit kapitan' blog post[4]), but once used to it it's hard to do without, and their combination makes them even more useful (esp. if you deploy K8s).
In Ruud's case, Jsonnet might have been worth looking at as Hashicorp tools can be configured with json in addition to HCL. But that would have been less fun I guess ;-)
I hope for Ruud it finds its niche, there's quite some competition in this field!
1: https://jsonnet.org/
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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)
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Introduction to Jsonnet: The YAML/JSON templating language
jsonnet cli: link
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10 Ways for Kubernetes Declarative Configuration Management
Jsonnet: A data template language implemented in C++, suitable for application and tool developers, can generate configuration data and organize, simplify and manage large configurations without side effects.
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-❄️- 2023 Day 4 Solutions -❄️-
[Language: Jsonnet] (on GitHub)
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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: Keep – GitHub Actions for your monitoring tools
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That people produce HTML with string templates is telling us something
Apologies for the lack of context, and for missing this comment until today.
Both are tools for defining kubernetes manifests (which are YAML) in a reusable manner.
Jsonnet is a formally specified extension of JSON. It’s essentially a functional programming language (w/some object oriented features) that generates config files in JSON/YAML/etc, so it’s straightforward to determine whether an input file is valid, and to throw an error that points to an exact line if it’s not. It has a high learning curve, especially for people whose only experience is with imperative languages.
https://jsonnet.org/
Helm charts also generate YAML/JSON config files, but they use Go templating. This is easier and faster to understand, since it’s mostly string substitution and not much logic (there’s conditionals, iterators, and very basic helper functions). Unfortunately a simple typo or mistake can cause errors that are difficult to diagnose (the message may indicate a problem far away in code from the actual mistake). It can also generate output that’s valid according to the string templating rules, but not what was intended, which can be very confusing to debug.
Despite these shortcomings, the vast majority of kubernetes applications are distributed as helm charts. I understand why things ended up this way, but I still wish it were more common for people to invest the upfront effort to learn the superior tool, so it could be more widespread.
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TOML: Tom's Obvious Minimal Language
I like Google's Jsonnet [1], which has all of this except for 4.
Jsonnet is quite mature, with fairly wide language adoption, and has the benefit of supporting expressions, including conditionals, arithmetic, as well as being able to define reusable blocks inside function definitions or external files.
It's not suitable as a serialization format, but great for config. It's popular in some circles, but I'm sad that it has not reached wider adoption.
[1] https://jsonnet.org/
- Jsonnet – The Data Templating Language
What are some alternatives?
yaml-reference-parser
kube-libsonnet - Bitnami's jsonnet library for building Kubernetes manifests
dhall - Maintainable configuration files
dhall-lang - Maintainable configuration files
dhall-kubernetes - Typecheck, template and modularize your Kubernetes definitions with Dhall
cue - CUE has moved to https://github.com/cue-lang/cue
starlark-go - Starlark in Go: the Starlark configuration language, implemented in Go
cue - The home of the CUE language! Validate and define text-based and dynamic configuration
openapi-python-client - Generate modern Python clients from OpenAPI
json5 - JSON5 — JSON for Humans
cdk8s - Define Kubernetes native apps and abstractions using object-oriented programming