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by _8ljf 2020 days ago
“this is the language that powers Cloud Firestore / Cloud Storage security rules”

This really needs to be stated on its front page. Right now it’s all “Hows” and no “Why”.

First question anyone looking at it asks: What problem does it solve?/What need does it fill? A real-world use case provides an easy relatable answer.

Incidentally, with existing links to protobuf and no halting problem to worry about, it sounds like you’re halfway to having a remote query language a-la SQL too.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221553413_Safe_Quer...

2 comments

The link given if for the spec, this is probably a better "intro" page: https://opensource.google/projects/cel
I actually looked at this thinking it was pretty cool and could come up with usecases immediately–it is a great way to do simple query/matching in a consistent way. If I'm not mistaken, this could be used for something like Gmail's advanced search? There are tons of interfaces where everyone designs their own ad-hoc expressions and having something like this would be very useful in those cases.