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by stephen 190 days ago
I thought Dagger had/has a lot of potential to be "AWS-CDK for CI pipelines".

I.e. declaratively setup a web of CI / deployment tasks, based on docker, with a code-first DSL, instead of the morass of copy-pasted (and yes orbs) CircleCI yaml files we have strewn about our internals repos.

But their DSL for defining your pipelines is ... golang? Like who would pick golang as "a friendly language for setting up configs".

The underlying tech is technically language-agnostic, just as aws-cdk's is (you can share cdk constructs across TypeScript/Python), but it's rooted in golang as the originating/first-class language, so imo will never hit aws-cdk levels of ergonomics.

That technical nit aside, I love the idea; ran a few examples of it a year or so ago and was really impressed with the speed; just couldn't wrap my around "how can I make this look like cdk".
1 comments
esafak 190 days ago
They have SDKs in many languages, not just Go. I use the python one. And they use code, not a DSL.
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stephen 189 days ago
Right, my point is that this:

https://docs.dagger.io/cookbook/services?sdk=typescript

Still looks like "a circa-2000s Java builder API" and doesn't look like pleasant / declarative / idiomatic TypeScript, which is what aws-cdk pulled off.

Genuinely impressively (imo), aws-cdk intermixes "it's declarative" (you're setting up your desired state) but also "it's code" (you can use all the usual abstractions) in a way that is pretty great & unique.

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shykes 189 days ago
Could you share an example of aws-cdk code that you think Dagger should take inspiration from? Dagger and aws-cdk work very differently under the hood, so it's difficult to make an apples-to-apples comparison. If there's a way to make Dagger more TS-native without sacrificing other important properties of Dagger, I'm interested. Thanks.
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stephen 187 days ago
Hello! Yeah, I totally get Dagger is more "hey client please create a DAG via RPC calls", but just making something up in 30 seconds, like this is what I had in mind:

https://gist.github.com/stephenh/8c7823229dfffc0347c2e94a3c9...

Like I'm still building a DAG, but by creating objects with "kinda POJOs" (doesn't have to be literally POJOs) and then stitching them together, like the outputs of 1 construct (the build) can be used as inputs to the other constructs (tests & container).

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