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Comment by jakewins | Hacker News Reader

It seems because of the compiler tool chain? Eg this language can be “compiled” to terraform manifests.

To do that with JavaScript or python you’d need some really strong static analysis to work out what to do if the user, say, writes a function that returns a list of new buckets to create, or whatever.

Eg the argument seems to be the ability to statically deduce the required underlying cloud resources the code is talking about

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But you can generate e.g. terraform manifests from any language without actually compiling (or transpiling) to it? That seems barely more than an implementation detail: I get .tf or whatever I want at the end of it, that's all I care about isn't it?

On the other hand the example on the landing page looks very close to what I can do with Pulumi (in Typescript) already.

I’m a fan/user of Pulumi, but this doesn’t feel similar to me. In Pulumi you write code that describes infrastructure, separate from the application layer code you’re deploying.

This appears to be using application code to derive infrastructure config automatically. It’s a but like the https://www.shuttle.rs/ approach.

Edit: after taking a deeper look, a more accurate description might be that it allows you to embed application code within IAC.

Pulumi has both, they have something very similar to what is being offered here: https://www.pulumi.com/docs/tutorials/cloudfx/

I did not know that, I stand corrected!

If a library is provided for developers to express the cloud stuff (including custom types), then I believe zero or close to zero static analysis will be needed.

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