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Comment by didip | Hacker News Reader

I always thought Lua would be great for config files. Better than YAML even, since it's an actual language.

Imagine if Kubernetes config files are actually Lua files.

Lua was originally invented as a way to describe complex data. At some point it was enhanced with executable data and from there it’s a small step to become a programming language.

I don't think it's a good idea to make config files complicate. I don't want to run a debugger to know how my configuration file works.

Using Lua tables alone would be anything but complicated. The syntax is almost the same as JSON.

You just have to practice self-discipline and not let Turing creep take over.

Still beats a yaml file format that has evolved so far that is effectively describing a program and has no tooling at all.

Agreed. Last thing you want is a Turing complete language for config. Imagine your config to be non terminating! (And no way to check that.)

You can do that with nginx https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/dynamic-modules/lua... . IIRC Cloudflare uses this extensively.

> Cloudflare uses this extensively

Thanks for this mention - I found:

CloudFlare repos on GitHub using Lua: https://github.com/cloudflare?q=lua

Blog posts with "Lua" tag: https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/lua/

Pushing Nginx to its limit with Lua - https://blog.cloudflare.com/pushing-nginx-to-its-limit-with-...

We make use of OpenResty and LuaJIT although we are moving away from them and more and more towards code written in Rust and other languages.

Yaml is already too complex to be reliable.

I was already doing it in 1999 with Tcl, nothing new really. :)

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