Looks like you got a new alternative option to yam...

# amper

[James Ward]

Looks like you got a new alternative option to yaml: https://pkl-lang.org/blog/introducing-pkl.html
Reminds me of Dhall but not as FP oriented.

[Stylianos Gakis]

I read through it today and honestly it did feel a lot like what Amber would like to have, without having to do it in Kotlin or something like that which they didn't want to use for various reasons.
I'd like to hear from the amber devs if this looks interesting to them, or if not, why.

[Jakub Gwóźdź]

It does sound interesting, not only for amper. If they're going to provide kotlin.serialization library.

[stojan]

I think the bigger problem with Dhall is the lack of Kotlin binding. And pkl has that

[louiscad]

It looks like Apple doing the homework of JetBrains in a way JetBrains can use, fork, or copy.

[louiscad]

Said homework made with Java… and Kotlin! Yes, you read that right, there's no Swift in there, despite the Swift bindings!

[James Ward]

My guess is that this is mostly driven by their server / infra folks not the mobile folks. A bunch of it is written in Kotlin, including a lot of their CLI which could be a good future candidate for Kotlin/Native instead of GraalVM.

[dsavvinov]

> I’d like to hear from the amber devs if this looks interesting to them, or if not, why
It’s absolutely does look interesting to us! We did the research of pretty much all reasonable declarative languages (I think we have 15 on the table at the moment), and we’re continuing to revisit them from time to time, as the design evolves. So we’re of course very happy and excited to see one more player there!

[dsavvinov]

My personal opinion about Pickle (doesn’t represent the team’s opinion, we haven’t had time to discuss it yet): it is really good. I see a lot of design decisions that are well-thought and resonate deeply with the problems I personally see in the problem of designing a configuration language.

Now, of course, there’s much more to the final choice, I haven’t had enough time to look really deeply into Pickle so I’m 100% sure I’m missing a lot of details

[James Ward]

Yeah, that matches my opinions. I've thought that Dhall would be a great language for a build system but Pkl is even better, more approachable. Better language bindings & tooling. Covers most of the gaps that Dhall would have in this space. One thing that maybe JetBrains can help with to make Pkl even better: https://github.com/apple/pkl/issues/22

[louiscad]

Just noticed there's an IntelliJ plugin for Pickle already: https://github.com/apple/pkl-intellij

[James Ward]

I started messing with Gradle + Pkl: https://github.com/jamesward/grapkl

Just parsing Pkl with no schema yet and setting Gradle stuff based on that. Nothing much there yet. I investigated Pkl -> Kotlin to see if it could generate a kts and that was gonna be harder.