We are working on wrapping TF in CUE since you can CUE->JSON->TF
https://github.com/hofstadter-io/cuelm
Many more CUE experiments are going on in the devops space
from pulumi_aws import s3
bucket = s3.Bucket('bucket')
for i in range(10):
s3.BucketObject(
f'object-{i}',
s3.BucketObjectArgs(
bucket=bucket.id,
key=str(i),
)
)
Disclaimer: I led the YAML project and added the compiler feature at the request of some folks internally looking for CUE support :)
[1] https://www.pulumi.com/blog/pulumi-is-imperative-declarative...
[2] https://www.pulumi.com/blog/extending-pulumi-languages-with-...
[3] https://leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2022/05/04/deploying-kubernetes...
Even if I use the Yaml compiler for CUE (which we did) I still have to write `fn::` strings as keys, which is ugly and not the direction our industry should go. Let's stop putting imperative constructs into string, let's use a better language for configuration, something purpose built, not an SDK in an imperative language. These "fn::" strings are just bringing imperative constructs back into what could have been an actual declarative interface. Note, Pulumi is not alone here, there are lots of people hacking Yaml because they don't know what else there is to do. CEL making it's way to k8s is another specific example.
This cannot be the state-of-art in ops, we can do much better, but I get that Pulumi is trying to reach a different set of users than devops and will end up with different choices and tradeoffs
(I maintain https://cuetorials.com and am very active in the CUE community)
The imperative part of that code appears to be analogous to templating. The actual work done under the covers is not imperative, but is based on the difference between the result of the template execution and the current state of the system. That's what makes it declarative.
One of the interesting aspects of CUE is that it gives us many of the programming constructs we are used to, but remains Turing incomplete, so no general recursion or user defined functions. There is a scripting layer where you can get more real world stuff done too
The CUE language is super interesting, has a very unique take on things and comes from the same heritage as Go, containers, and Kubernetes