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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

I agree that Bazel did pretty well with Starlark, but the reason that’s sane is because it’s not Python, though the syntax is similar. It avoids getting into trouble with people using Python language features that would result in upgrade hell and annoy other programmers who aren’t Python experts.

(Though, debugging complicated Starlark code can still be difficult.)

So why not use Starlark? :)

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Starlark is great, but so is Scala. People underestimate how big the ecosystem is even for a niche language like Scala:

- Global publishing and distribution infrastructure

- IDE support in multiple IDEs

- A huge ecosystem of third party packages, both Scala and Java

- An excellent Scala standard library and Java standard library

- Good performance.

- Tooling! Jprofiler is great. Others use Yourkit or JFR.

- Mill leans havily on Scala's FP/OO hybrid style with types, while starlark provides none of that and is purely untyped procedural code

Just wanted to mention that there are much better config languages than Starlark by now: CUE, Pkl, etc.

I was going to mention Cue, but I’ve only read about it, not used it, and couldn’t actually say whether it’s better.

I'm afraid that no current config language is an obvious fit for Mill. That's because Mill is fully reactive and doesn't distinguish between build configuration and execution by design.

Why do you call these other languages “better”? They’re different, but I’m not sure why either of the one’s you mentioned would be better for this use case.

Modern config languages offer strong validation and advanced IDE support, which is essential for a great user experience.

https://pkl-lang.org/intellij/current/highlights.html

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