Dagger originally started with CUE, and is still powered by it under the hood, which has the constructs you mention, while also being turing incomplete.

I don't understand this move to define infra and CI imperatively, and tool vendors moving to support umptine languages for their users... Say what the world should look like, not how to get there?

Thanks for your work on cue (cuetorials)!

It's really a blessing for something like CUE to come (I've had some exposure to gcl/bcl and if it wasn't for the internal diffing tool, I would've been lost - https://pure.tue.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/46927079/638953-1.... )

I've even started prototyping something like bazel/gn but based on cue, but no time to finish it up.

Software is never finished... keep moving it forward when you can!

Not a snarky question : what about having data and config in yml, and some high level tool like ansible or terraform and the occasional bash?

You loop and branch in ansible/terraform

I hate that setup but also I have a hard time thinking of something else

Looping in ansible/terraform is exactly the problem. Logic and control flow in YAML/hcl is a nightmare. Plus there's no debugging! You can't set breakpoints in a yaml file or HCL.

Adding more YAML to be parsed by other YAML is just terrible at scale.

You definitely can in Ansible.

you _can_. but _should_ you?

Ansible / Terraform are great when you're declarative, but once you start adding too much logic, things get hairy.

I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between configuration and code in a CI pipeline. This is what people try to do, and it's frankly a massive waste.

The problem is the attempt to make a distinction when there cannot be one.

Something like Dhall might be viable for pipelines. I wonder if there are any efforts in that direction.