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Comment by phaer | Hacker News Reader

Could you elaborate on the differences to HCL? It looks almost the same on first glance. Maybe minus functions and and nested blocks in HCL.

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Hi, HCL was one of the source of inspiration. We wanted to push it 1 step further by providing a clear and open specification which allows to create parsers for languages other than go.

So the main differences are the ecosystem: a CLI to auto format - think go fmt) and validate SAN files, parsers for languages others than Go

Are you aware of the HCL2 specification at https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl2/blob/master/hcl/hclsyntax/...? It also provides a validator, even for custom schema definitions.

Yes, The problem is that we want a pure data configuration format. We think that very few application require a full turing complete language for their configuration.

Bazel have too it's own (turing complete ?) Programming configuration language

Bazel's language (https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark), also used in Buck and other tools, is technically not Turing-complete. In Bazel's BUILD files, there are additional restrictions (e.g. no function definition), making them relatively declarative and tool-friendly.

I literally just started prototyping this exact idea last week: a python interpreter without any imports/stdlib as a configuration language.

I'm a little bummed I was beat to it. I was going back and forth on allowing defining functions. Definitely no classes.

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