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Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

A cloud-oriented language should have a way to output for every function that has financial cost, there should be a cost estimator or inspector that provides estimated cost ranges for execution, or at least some indication of potential cost impact. The language should optimize for cost-reduction instead of performance as the cloud presents a cost / performance tradeoff.

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Interesting.

Maybe also add a "reliability" cost, so something like S3 would be more reliable than a more complex system like RedShift.

Exactly. The cloud orientation that differentiates from a non-cloud orientation is not simply a matter of execution abstraction -- that is already handled through libraries and scripts, etc. What would be cloud-oriented are the economic aspects of the cloud. I usually tell people that the cloud is really two separate ideas: the abstraction of infrastructure and computing on the one hand (what used to be called "grid computing") and the economic model of pay-per-consumption, pay-per-use, pay-per-service that shifts capital expenses (the stuff you own and have already paid for that depreciates over time) to operating expenses (stuff you have to keep paying to use). The CIOs like the technology on-demand, easy scale-up/scale-down aspects of the cloud while the CFOs like the idea of shifting CapEx to OpEx and pay as you go aspects of the cloud.

[Wing team member here] We are looking into adding cost evaluation and cost optimization abilities in Wing in the future. Right now we are focusing on the basics of the language. You are welcome to join our GitHub repo and vote on the features that are important for you.

Since Wing compiles to Terraform, you should be able to manually run Infracost (https://www.infracost.io) to get an idea of costs.

Having that capability baked into the language/compiler would be a great addition.

Infracost is OK. It's not great, it's OK. To not be meaningless, it's not always accurate, still has some bugs, doesn't cover everything. But it's still the best tool in its class and I use it.

If the value proposition of a cloud language included "infracost but better", I might be more inclined to listen.

[Wing team member here] We are looking into adding cost gauging and cost cutting abilities in Wing in the future. Right now we are focusing on the basics of the language. You are welcome to join our GitHub repo and vote on the features that are important for you.

I'm co-founder of Infracost, happy to chat more about how we can make it great :) feel free to join the community chat if you want to DM me: https://www.infracost.io/community-chat

> The language should optimize for cost-reduction instead of performance

Citation needed. What about those that want performance in the cloud?

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