why not an alternative to a custom language about hcl2 HOT 3 CLOSED

The very first paragraph of the Configuration Syntax documentation probably summarizes Hashicorp's stance on this.

I think there's also a large factor at play that Hashicorp has a whole fleet of tools, written in Go-lang, and having their own configuration language gives them complete control over the format from the ground up.

Tools that use HCL:

• Terraform
• Terraform-Bundle - a little helper script for pre-bundling terraform plugins
• Nomad
• Consul
• Vault

... and I'm sure there's others, by Hashicorp and the community at large.

Personally... I favour the JSON syntax for most projects since it allows me to quickly write tools that understand my configuration in almost any language... but as support for HCL expands, I definitely see some advantages to it's readability and the availability of the parser itself as an open source library.

from hcl2.

The DSL could be written in Lua as well. There are implementations specifically built for Golang integration.

from hcl2.

Hi @jtarchie,

This seems like a Terraform question more than an HCL question. If you'd like to discuss design decisions for Terraform, please do so over in Terraform's repository.

Thanks

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