Starlark Programming Language

1. Mill

   1 16 2,381 9.9 Scala

   Mill is a fast JVM build tool that supports Java, Scala, Kotlin and many other languages. 2-4x faster than Gradle and 4-10x faster than Maven for common workflows, Mill aims to make your project’s build process performant, maintainable, and flexible

   

   Starlark is definitely a mixed experience IMO.

   On one hand, having a "hermetic" subset of Python is nice. You can be sure your starlark codebase isn't going to be making network calls or reading files or shelling out to subprocesses and all that. The fact that it is hermetic does help make things reproducible and deterministic, and enables paralleization and caching and other things

   On the other hand, a large Starlark codebase is a large Python codebase, and large Python codebases are imperative, untyped, and can get messy even without all the things mentioned above. Even though your Starlark is pure and deterministic, it still easily ends up a rats nest of sphagetti.

   For https://mill-build.org we went the opposite route: not enforcing purity, but using a language with strong types and a strong functional bent to it. So far it's been working out OK, but it remains to be seen how well it scales to ever larger and more complex build setups

2. InfluxDB

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   InfluxDB high-performance time series database. Collect, organize, and act on massive volumes of high-resolution data to power real-time intelligent systems.

   

3. cue

   2 123 5,399 9.9 Go

   The home of the CUE language! Validate and define text-based and dynamic configuration

   

   The primitive-recursive property of Cue (https://cuelang.org) is a big draw for me, and may be an alternative worth checking out. The authors have spent a great amount of attention to the type system (they learned a lot of lessons from previous config language designs that did not take lattice theory and unification into account).

4. starlarky

   3 1 32 8.4 Java

   VGS edition of Google's safe and hermetically sealed Starlark language - a non-Turing complete subset of Python 3.

   

   I love Starlark. I was a major implementor of it at VGS (the repo is open: https://github.com/verygoodsecurity/starlarky). It had unique distinct features that made it much easier to control and sandbox than many other languages out there.

   I even built a codemod library that does a very basic python -> starlark so that one can develop using python ecosystem libraries and just copy & paste into a secure execution environment. It was a huge success at my last company.

   I'm very thankful to Laurent Le-brun and Alan Donovan -- both of whom are exceptional engineers that I learned so much from. I thought I was skilled but both of those individuals are just on another level.

5. clace

   4 29 585 9.6 Go

   App deployment simplified. GitOps without the hassles. Application server for deploying internal tools for teams.

   

   I have been building an internal tools development and deployment platform [1]. It is built in Go, using Starlark for configuration and API business logic.

   Starlark has been great to build with. You get the readability of having a simple subset of python, without python's dependency management challenges. It is easily extensible with plugin APIs. Concurrent API performance is great without the python async challenges.

   One challenge wrt using Starlark as an general purpose embedded scripting language is that it does not support usual error handling features. There are no exceptions and no multi value return for error values, all errors result in an abort. This works for a config language, where a fail-fast behavior is good. But for a general purpose script, you need more fine grained error handling. Since I am using Starlark for API logic only, I came up with a user definable error handling behavior. This uses thread locals to keep track of error state [2], which might not work for more general purpose scripting use cases.

   [1] https://github.com/claceio/clace

   [2] https://clace.io/docs/plugins/overview/#automatic-error-hand...

6. BUSY

   5 26 86 3.7 C

   BUSY is a lean, statically typed, cross-platform, easily bootstrappable build system for GCC, CLANG and MSVC inspired by Google GN

   

   > a large Starlark codebase is a large Python codebase, and large Python codebases are imperative, untyped, and can get messy even without all the things mentioned above. Even though your Starlark is pure and deterministic, it still easily ends up a rats nest of sphagetti

   This brings it to the point. I'm still wondering why the achievements of software engineering of the past fifty years, like modularization, structured and object-oriented programming, and static type checking had apparently so little influence on build systems. I implemented https://github.com/rochus-keller/BUSY for this reason, but it seems to require a greater cultural shift than most developers are already willing to make.

7. tilt

   6 58 8,036 8.6 Go

   Define your dev environment as code. For microservice apps on Kubernetes.

   

8. py2star

   7 1 12 - Python

   Converts python files to starlark (or Larky) compatible scripts.

   

9. CodeRabbit

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10. buck2

    8 37 3,808 10.0 Rust

    Build system, successor to Buck

    

    Allegedly it has an LSP and vscode support but I also have never used either.

    https://github.com/facebook/buck2/tree/main/starlark-rust/vs...

11. python-starlark-go

    9 1 27 5.8 Python

    🐍 Python bindings for starlark-go 🐍

    

12. starlark-pyo3

    10 1 21 6.7 Rust

    A Python wrapper for starlark-rust

    

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