Today we announced that we are discontinuing official support for the CUE language in Dagger. This is mostly a technicality, since our CUE SDK has been on life support for over a year, and the community has largely moved on to Go, Python, Typescript, or one of the other experimental SDKs contributed by the community: Rust, Java, .Net, Elixir. But it's still an important moment for me, since CUE played such a crucial part in the early days of Dagger. So I thought I'd share a little bit of that history. In the early days of prototyping Dagger, we faced a big problem. We had a clear vision: a "devops operating system" which could encode all devops expertise into high-quality software instead of artisanal scripts; and we had an engine that could trivially orchestrate even the most complex pipelines by modeling them as a graph - more specifically, a DAG. What we didn't have was a programming language which could keep up with our engine. Most popular programming languages are imperative, so they can only program one computer at a time, one instruction at a time: "do A, then B, then C". But programming a graph requires first describing the layouts of its nodes: "D takes inputs from C and A. A has no inputs. B and C take inputs from A". Declarative languages are better at this, but they otherwise lack the basic features required to write high-quality software: comments, tests, reusable packages, language servers, proper tooling, and most importantly: a thriving ecosystem. So when we discovered CUE, we were ecstatic. Here was a declarative language that promised a development experience as good as imperative languages. We could get our cake and eat it too! We got to work, and when Dagger launched in March 2022, it only supported one language: CUE. How else would we offer the perfect combination of declarative and imperative? However, we soon learned that software teams overwhelmingly prefer writing pipelines in a language they already know, and have little appetite for learning yet another configuration language, however elegant. The people had spoken, and they wanted multi-language. Luckily, we found another way to achieve the crucial balance of declarative and imperative. In the Fall of 2023, we introduced a new version of Dagger based on a GraphQL API. As it turns out, the GraphQL language is also declarative, and a perfect git for modeling graphs - it's even in the name! But unlike CUE, it is designed to be generated dynamically by clients in any imperative language. This is similar to how web applications written in PHP, Ruby or Java will query a database with dynamic SQL requests. This design gave us the best of both worlds: a familiar programming language, and the power of a DAG compute model. Even though Dagger is no longer built on CUE, it will always have a special place in my heart. It remains in my opinion, an elegant and revolutionary approach to configuration management, with huge potential. I strongly encourage every SRE to study it.

It is with great pleasure that we finally announce the release of version 1.0.1 (github.com/eigr/spawn/releas…) of Spawn 🚀 – at the same time we welcome Sepp, our new mascot. #webeamtogether #spawn #elixirlang