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We use HCL broadly across the HashiCorp portfolio. It was popularized by Terraform, but also used in Vault, Consul, Nomad, and Packer.

Important to note, that HCL is designed to be completely interoperable with JSON. In practice, we find that HCL tends to be more human readable and writable and is significantly less verbose.

However, if you are doing any sort of machine generation, it can be convenient to generate JSON and feed that in.

Terraform uses HCL, and it’s done pretty well! I think it’s significantly more ergonomic than YAML and JSON (and even slightly more than TOML).

And yet terraform uses the same format and is the leader in its space?

HCL is a superset of JSON, so tools can still output json. having worked with HCL before for terraform, I can say it is way nicer for human-edited config files than either YAML or JSON.