STStreamBright·Jun 9, 2021
Best thing is Dhall that I am aware of. Same situation, working as a consultant, forced to use broken things.
https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes
In Terraform 1.0dhall-lang
dhall-kubernetes
Dhall2018–2025
dhall-lang / dhall-kubernetes
dhall-kubernetes
Typecheck, template and modularize your Kubernetes definitions with Dhall
20Distinct people
24Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
650GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Typecheck, template and modularize your Kubernetes definitions with Dhall
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
Dhall is my favorite configuration language that I never get around to using. I manage DNS in Terraform, and since every Terraform provider uses different objects definitions,…
sshine used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- dhall-lang/dhall-lang · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 4:00:59 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year24 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-07-13 15:56:16 UTC to 2025-04-13 06:32:20 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesLets look at a specific example. Take Kubernetes: everything is yaml, with complete schemas, all the way down. From your perspective this is configuration utopia, right? Meanwhile back in reality k8s is the poster child of "yaml hell". From the day it was released, people took one look at it, gave it a giant NOPE and instantly spawned half a dozen templating languages. The most popular of these is helm, which has a terrible, no good, very bad design: full of potential injection attacks from purely textual string substitution, manually specified indentation to embed parameterized blocks, virtually no intermediate validation, no way to validate unused features, etc etc
Compare to dhall which publishes a complete set of dhall-k8s schema mappings which enables you to factor out any design you want down to as few configuration variables as you
Read the rest
like, while validating the configuration generators themselves at design time. https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes#more-modular-...
It's great if the system is built directly on top of it, e.g. spago. Not so much if you're trying to type yaml. Dhall is very opinionated, so trying to use it like TypeScript to type an untyped structure is... interesting.
E.g. for Kubernetes: https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes
In Intercal, YAML, and Other Horrible Programming Languages