[dhess]

What’s the plan for dealing with the Terraform CDK?

[bilalq]

This is a big question for me. The CDK style form of authoring IaC is way better than config files in HCL/YML/JSON. It has some rough edges and I do wish it wasn't so gung-ho on the magical object-oriented constructor side-effects, but it's still a net improvement.

CDKTF looks promising. How will OpenTF interplay with it?

[fishnchips]

I'm not into the CDK at all to be honest but isn't it a glorified preprocessor that generates the JSON representation of Terraform input, which is then processed as usual by your regular Terraform binary?

[Coryodaniel]

This is correct. TFCDK is also MPL (for now?).

You will be able to generate tfjson w tfcdk and execute it with opentf

[paulddraper]

Yes.

But a preprocessor that deserves the glory.

Imagine writing in a real programming language, with real variables, loops, function calls, etc. And then imagine trying to use HCL instead.

[fishnchips]

To each his own I guess. I personally like the HTML-like mental model that HCL gives me. In a sense not being a programming language is to me a benefit. If anything, I'd love to see an equivalent of CSS to Terraform - an idea someone smarter than me was floating not so long ago. Decoupling structure from specifics - I can see a well thought-out implementation of this concept actually taking off.

Re: programming languages... I love programming. Just not my infra.

[paulddraper]

HTML is a wonderful example.

Very few applications built as HTML. Always some templating language/process on top of it.

[fishnchips]

Touche.

[spicyusername]

Sounds like a recipe for hard to read, bespoke, spaghetti to me.

One of the benefits to HCL is standardization. Every terraform module looks exactly the same as every other module.

[paulddraper]

Far from it, it's familiar, succinct, and well structured.

There's a reason Cloudformation added CDK, and Pulumni only uses mainstream languages.