Comment by thethethethe
3 years ago
The number of lines of BCL at Google says little-to-nothing about the efficacy of the language itself, it's more of a reflection of the complexity and scale of the _systems_ its used to configure.
3 years ago
The number of lines of BCL at Google says little-to-nothing about the efficacy of the language itself, it's more of a reflection of the complexity and scale of the _systems_ its used to configure.
BCL is great, it's just lived out by its longevity.
But the point is that this large scale application offered the space for exploring the space of configuration as code, infra as code, and many relevant technical problem space for designing and deploying configuration.
It's it a good language? Unknown.
Can it be used to successfully build and maintain configuration at extremely large volume and complexity scales? Yes.
Also we're not talking about using this language, but its spiritual successor.
> It's it a good language? Unknown.
I have personally written several thousand lines GCL (the generic version of BCL used at Google) and I can say that it can be pretty frustrating.
The difficulty and complexity of defining configurations using it really depends on the system you are configuring since you are (generally) just defining a set of static fields that are packaged into a protobuf and fed into whatever system you are working with.
Outside of syntax issues, it's up to the system you are configuring to provide concise config semantics and helpful error messages