Regardless of what language you use to write your cdk stacks, the cdk cli application which transpiles your cdk stacks into cloudformation requires nodejs. So in reality cdk requires nodejs — always — and then whatever language you are writing the stacks in as well. It becomes a pain in the ass when you have a python application which is defined in a python cdk stack, but you still need nodejs to transpile your python cdk stack into cloudformation.

My main gripe is that the cdk cli should be distributed as a standalone binary so I don’t need to install nodejs to deploy my project.