BBbboreham·Mar 27, 2023
One take on that idea:
https://github.com/jkcfg/jK
In Jsonnet – The Data Templating Languagejkcfg
jk
Go2019–2023
jkcfg / jk
jk
Configuration as Code with ECMAScript
3Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
405GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Configuration as Code with ECMAScript
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 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 year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-06-29 13:22:52 UTC to 2023-03-27 20:38:30 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 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 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesPeople have tried: https://github.com/jkcfg/jk
But yeah I agree. The thing is, if all you need is robust determinism why do you need a full functional language with currying and other complex concepts?
Google had the same problem for Bazel, and their solution (Starlark) is way easier to understand.
In The Curse of NixOSIt's possible to sandbox most languages, and with some work you can probably make them deterministic too.
Here's an example: https://github.com/jkcfg/jk
That beats having to learn an entirely new language.
In The perfect configuration format? Try TypeScriptWhy? The only reasons I can think of are:
* They can be non-deterministic (do a different thing each time you run them).
* They can be non-hermetic (access stuff in the environment you don't know about).
* They can do naughty security things.
* You can't present GUIs of them because they aren't declarative.
All but the last one don't exclude programming languages. Here's an interesting project to make hermetic deterministic Javascript (Typescript support is planned):
https://github.com/jkcfg/jk
For the sorts of places where you don't have a GUI for the settings anyway (which is the common case) I think it makes loads of sense. It beats making the kind of declarative programming languages you see in YAML files.
In The perfect configuration format? Try TypeScriptMaybe Javascript? A lot of web tools support Javascript config files. There's this nice-looking effort to provide a hermetic execution environment for them: https://github.com/jkcfg/jk and if you use Typescript you get an extremely good static type system too. Plus the language is already very well known with loads of tool support and documentation.
Definitely what I would use today.
In Cue: A new language for data validationjk: Configuration as Code with ECMAScript
2 points · Open discussion