Google is a mess of configuration languages. Starlark, GCL, piccolo, textproto, yaml, the weird subset of starlark boq uses. From the outside it seems a lot more uniform than it is.
It's a mess, yes, but it's better than most places I've seen that end up using a bunch of YAML/JSON and then poorly defined custom tools to mangle things together.
Also I'd argue that there's a good core in Google's config stack: everything resolving to a proto at the bottom, textproto for "raw" representations, and having one language above that. If we could standardise on that it would be good, but of course that's unlikely.
Does Boq use a subset of Starlark? I thought it was Piccolo. I've always assumed Piccolo predated Starlark and that Starlark was essentially the external-first rewrite with some learnings.
Google is trying to standardize on a few configuration languages: GCL (because it was too hard to migrate away from it), Starlark (when BCL is not suitable) and Text proto (for things that don't need logic).
It used to be a complete mess, but a plan was written a couple of years ago. So there's hope of improvement.
Both Starlark and CUE are projects that evolved from former Googlers learnings about BCL and GCL
aiui, Starlark is closer to the internal languages while CUE takes a different philosophical approach (logical language that ensures correctness at scale)
esprehn|1 year ago
danpalmer|1 year ago
Also I'd argue that there's a good core in Google's config stack: everything resolving to a proto at the bottom, textproto for "raw" representations, and having one language above that. If we could standardise on that it would be good, but of course that's unlikely.
Does Boq use a subset of Starlark? I thought it was Piccolo. I've always assumed Piccolo predated Starlark and that Starlark was essentially the external-first rewrite with some learnings.
laurentlb|1 year ago
It used to be a complete mess, but a plan was written a couple of years ago. So there's hope of improvement.
Rebelgecko|1 year ago
verdverm|1 year ago
aiui, Starlark is closer to the internal languages while CUE takes a different philosophical approach (logical language that ensures correctness at scale)