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Comment by levlaz | Hacker News Reader

What kind of tooling do you have in mind to replace?

Also what would you prefer to see instead of bash compatible?

i want to move away from GitHub Actions and I also want to move away from some bespoke monorepo tooling for something that's a better overall orchestrator of 'things'. Dagger scratches some of those itches, or seems to, so I've had my eye on it for a while. Knowing that they're trying to also help me define and use containerized environments - I sort of assumed I'd have to bring those myself.

I'm using Dagger in a monorepo setup (actually several). For the main one, I've gone the route of wrapping the Dagger Go SDK with a custom Go CLI (plus CUE as another centerpiece). For sure, I've been making the team aware of the challenges and rough edges. (of course there are a lot of ways people organize monorepos, we are polyglot with one go.mod but multiple package.json...)

I'm largely replacing Dockerfiles and Makefiles with a custom CLI that wraps Dagger. Being able to use a proper language, functions, packages, imports is so much better by comparison. (ymmv)

I mean if we're going full pie in the sky, fully declarative containers exist today:

https://github.com/nlewo/nix2container#nix2container

Dagger looks nifty, but it's too bad that it's still basically an imperative "start from thing, do stuff to it, publish" kind of model, rather than just expressing a desired end state and letting an underlying engine find its way there.

Dagger is fully declarative. It's just built on a dynamic declarative API, instead of a static declarative DSL.

So, if you took Nix, and replaced the static scheme-like DSL with a proper API, and then built SDKs in 5 languages for that API; and then built a bash-like shell also for easy scripting; then you would start to have something that approximates Dagger.

I stand corrected! I shall investigate more closely with this additional context. Thanks.

Thanks for giving it another chance! We need to get better at explaining all this, it's a lot to unpack, although prior experience with declarative systems like Nix or Bazel does help a lot :)

We have a very active discord, feel free to come by and ask all the tough questions!

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