the most interesting summary explanation of cue lang and its differences is from a bug filing - https://github.com/cuelang/cue/issues/33
>CUE is a bit different from the languages used in linguistics and more tailored to the general configuration issue as we've seen it at Google. But under the hood it adheres strictly to the concepts and principles of these approaches and we have been careful not to make the same mistakes made in BCL (which then were copied in all its offshoots). It also means that CUE can benefit from 30 years of research on this topic. For instance, under the hood, CUE uses a first-order unification algorithm, allowing us to build template extractors based on anti-unification (see issue #7 and #15), something that is not very meaningful or even possible with languages like BCL and Jsonnet.
In Cue: A new language for data validationcuelang
cue
Go2019–2021
cuelang / cue · Archived
cue
CUE has moved to https://github.com/cue-lang/cue
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CUE has moved to https://github.com/cue-lang/cue
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- hofstadter-io/hof · linked in 2 of the same discussions
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HN mentions by month41 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-04-14 09:14:16 UTC to 2021-10-19 18:04:48 UTC.
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View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 2019 | 2019-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| May 2019 | 2019-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2019 | 2019-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2019 | 2019-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 1 | 6 |
| Aug 2019 | 2019-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| Sep 2019 | 2019-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Oct 2019 | 2019-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2019 | 2019-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Dec 2019 | 2019-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2020 | 2020-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2020 | 2020-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2020 | 2020-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| May 2020 | 2020-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Jun 2020 | 2020-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Jul 2020 | 2020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Aug 2020 | 2020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2020 | 2020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Oct 2020 | 2020-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2020 | 2020-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Dec 2020 | 2020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Jan 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Feb 2021 | 2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2021 | 2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2021 | 2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| May 2021 | 2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2021 | 2021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| Jul 2021 | 2021-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2021 | 2021-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2021 | 2021-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2021 | 2021-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
CUE has moved to https://github.com/cue-lang/cue
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
41 sourcesConsider this example: https://github.com/cuelang/cue/discussions/967
How would you solve this with directory structure and "function structs" respectively? I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the former and ran into shadowing problems with the latter.
In Cue, an open-source data validation languageI'd say all of these problems have answers in CUE.
> I want to be able to write a "generic environment" module for each application and then parameterize it accordingly for each environment.
This is pretty solidly in the target use case range, i'd say - managing variations of the same "object type" over some dimension is a lot of what's targeted by the way that CUE treats directory hierarchies when loading files: https://cuelang.org/docs/concepts/packages/#instances
The main thing you have to consider in designing a layout is that you have to take a compositional approach to how you define individual config instances. That is, you can't start from prod's config, then override a value or two for staging.
If i were to do it - i have not, this is not how i currently use CUE - my first approach would probably be by defining defaults at the "p
Read the rest
olicy" level (per the above link), which effectively allows you to get exactly one "override"-ish behavior.
Lots of possible approaches to this, though.
> but you can't quite emulate functions as far as I can tell
Function-like capability is present, just in a form that's less familiar. I think of them as "function structs." This post has a bunch of examples https://github.com/cuelang/cue/issues/139#issuecomment-55677.... It seems there's a plan to add a more comfortable notation (https://github.com/cuelang/cue/issues/943), but it's fundamentally possible now.
Here's a simplified example for configuring GitHub Actions workflows: https://github.com/cuelang/cue/discussions/967
FWIW, I'm not looking for "inheritance".
In Cue, an open-source data validation languageCan't see how, and this seems to suggest this functionality is not implemented yet: https://github.com/cuelang/cue/discussions/663
Mind sharing a reference?
In Cue, an open-source data validation languageSome context:
Cue is a project originally started by Marcel van Lohuizen who previously was part of BCL (Borg Config Lang) at Google. The main use is to generate config files.
See the Kubernetes examples at: https://cuelang.org/docs/tutorials/
Here are two posts discussing the motivations for Cue over BCL/Jsonnet:
- https://github.com/cuelang/cue/issues/33#issuecomment-483615...
- https://github.com/cuelang/cue/discussions/669
A very interesting development is that Grafana appears to be adopting Cue as a first-class configuration option. See: "Bring new CUE-based config schema system to release-readiness" https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/33139
This could mean that a future where Grafana dashboards can be two-way synced with a git repo will eventually exist.
----
Other tools with some industry adoption in the "Infrastructure as Co
Read the rest
de" space include
- Dhall
- Jsonnet (from BCL)
- kustomize
- Helm
- kubecfg
- Tanka
- SkyCfg
- jkcfg
- Krane
- HCL (Terraform)
And two tools that fall into a separate class of enabling "Infrastructure as Software"
- Pulumi (TypeScript/Go/Python/.NET)
- CDK
Have you looked at Cuelang [1] as a configuration language or source of truth?. It's still new but it's a superset of JSON but attempted to combine data/schema into one and reject inheritance and replace with validation instead.
[1] https://github.com/cuelang/cue/tree/master/doc/tutorial/basi...
In Zellij – A Terminal Workspace and MultiplexerSo happy (because cue is a great solution) and surprised (it's niche atm) to see cue mentioned!
I invite readers to try the cue/Kubernetes tutorial, its inspired: https://github.com/cuelang/cue/blob/v0.2.2/doc/tutorial/kube...
Here the language creator explains the inspiration and the concept, then he works through the above tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3fhA12KS48
In Create Terraform files using Python scriptshttps://github.com/cuelang/cue ... a purpose built language for configuration
- Forked from Go in 2018
- Logical language with unification
- Full of interesting algorithms and real world optimizations
- Will eat DevOops / configuration management in the next few years
In Ask HN: What's the best Codebase you've read in 2020?https://github.com/cuelang/cue/discussions to see a beta participant
In GitHub Discussions BetaHighly recommend Go, especially for that realm. Building something else that already exists can provide a good roadmap and reference for how things are / can be done.
You could build a server, but I'd personally find something like https://nats.io (messaging) https://fission.io (serverless) or https://redis.io (cache) more interesting. You might also look at the Kubernetes ecosystem. Building a tool or service that can interact with the API can lead to new opportunities (people hiring specifically for operator experience). I work on a code generation tool (https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof) and https://github.com/cuelang/cue
Go's source is also pretty interesting and full of great things (https://github.com/golang/go). Here are some of the internals pulled out: https://github.com/rogpeppe/go-internal
In Ask HN: What side project improved your skills the most?You might also find "graph unification" algorithms and Propagator Networks interesting as well.
https://github.com/cuelang/cue/discussions/408
In Ontology, Graphs and TurtlesDiscovered this via a tweet: https://twitter.com/asynchio/status/1332399494634225664
I've been personally thinking about such things recently and found Drew's article reassuring that not needing to think like a unicorn is OK. Having taken a step back from raising funding has been freeing. Witnessing what it can do to companies, I worried what it would do to my OSS ethos. Still, to make something people love takes effort and money can help a lot.
Projects I work on for the interested:
- https://github.com/cuelang/cue
- https://github.com/hofstadter-io
In A few ways to make money in FOSSSo firstly, I really like this. I find it nicely readable, I like that the structure is almost all you have to write, and I'm quite a fan of lisp-y syntax anyway, so no surprises there.
The primary reason we choose Jsonnet for the registry library was because it's already become our data munger of choice at GoCardless, and we're keen to limit the number of tools we use to make our work more accessible to people outside our team, along with our new joiners.
So while your example works really quite beautifully for this use case, we'd naturally prefer to choose a tool that can work for all our use cases. And Jsonnet has a bit win over the language you've sketched here, in its inheritance and mixin semantics, which allow us to write configuration like complex Kubernetes manifests that are composeable and allow flexible overriding of fields fr
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om the caller.
Someone else has mentioned dhall-lang in the comments. We looked at this and several alternatives before we began a push for Jsonnet about a year ago- we ended up choosing Jsonnet over these because:
- Jsonnet has first-class support in Golang, our primary language for infrastructure code
- Everyone who knows JSON already knows how to write valid Jsonnet. This was important, as we expect application engineers to contribute to the Jsonnet config, and asking them to learn something totally novel is a bit much
- There were several tools like Ksonnet and Tanka from which we could take inspiration, especially around managing of Kubernetes resources, which was the big motivation behind a total revamp
If I were working on a team solo, I think dhall-lang would look really appealing to me. I like strongly typed languages and have a bit of experience in Haskell, so it looks very normal to me. That said, cuelang (https://github.com/cuelang/cue) looks super interesting, though it has a very different take to Jsonnet.
This is a roundabout way of saying I really like your example, and I see our choice of Jsonnet as another version of our choice of Golang: the network effects were too great to ignore, and it's good enough to work for almost everything, if not the best in any one area.
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