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Dhall Configuration Language VS Protobuf

Compare Dhall Configuration Language VS Protobuf and see what are their differences

Dhall Configuration Language logo Dhall Configuration Language

A non-repetitive alternative to YAML

Protobuf logo Protobuf

Protocol buffers are a language-neutral, platform-neutral extensible mechanism for serializing structured data.
  • Dhall Configuration Language Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-04-27
  • Protobuf Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-29

Dhall Configuration Language features and specs

  • Deterministic
    Dhall is designed to be a deterministic configuration language, meaning that given the same input, it will always produce the same output. This ensures consistency and repeatability across environments.
  • Type-Safe
    Dhall includes a strong static type system, preventing many common errors associated with misconfigurations. Types are checked at compile time, ensuring configuration values meet specific criteria before deployment.
  • Total Programming Language
    Unlike many other configuration languages, Dhall is a total functional programming language, which means every program written in Dhall will terminate. This prevents infinite loops and other runtime issues.
  • Interoperability
    Dhall can generate JSON, YAML, and other data interchange formats, making it highly interoperable with existing systems that require these formats for configuration.
  • Modular
    Dhall allows for modular configuration files. You can define reusable components and import them across different configurations, promoting DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principles.

Possible disadvantages of Dhall Configuration Language

  • Learning Curve
    While Dhall is designed to be simple, the presence of a type system and functional programming concepts can present a learning curve to new users, especially those without a programming background.
  • Tooling Support
    Compared to more established languages, Dhall has less tooling support. Users might find fewer IDE extensions, plugins, or community libraries to assist in development.
  • Limited Ecosystem
    Being relatively new, Dhall has a smaller ecosystem that may lack the breadth of community contributions, such as templates and integration examples, found in more mature configuration languages.
  • Performance Overhead
    The type checking and interpretation of Dhall can introduce some performance overhead compared to more traditional configuration formats like JSON or YAML, which are simpler to parse.
  • Complexity for Simple Configurations
    For simple configurations, the added complexity of Dhall's type system and functional features may be unnecessary, leading to overhead without a clear benefit.

Protobuf features and specs

  • Efficient Serialization
    Protobuf is known for its high efficiency in serializing structured data. It is faster and produces smaller size messages compared to JSON or XML, making it ideal for bandwidth-limited and resource-constrained environments.
  • Language Support
    Protobuf supports multiple programming languages including Java, C++, Python, Ruby, and Go. This makes it versatile and useful in heterogeneous environments.
  • Versioning Support
    It natively supports schema evolution without breaking existing implementations. Fields can be added or removed over time, ensuring backward and forward compatibility.
  • Type Safety
    Being a strongly typed data format, Protobuf ensures that data is correctly typed across different systems, preventing serialization and deserialization errors common with loosely typed formats.

Possible disadvantages of Protobuf

  • Learning Curve
    Protobuf requires learning and understanding its schema definitions and compiler usage, which might be a challenge for new developers.
  • Lack of Human Readability
    Serialized Protobuf data is in a binary format, making it less readable and debuggable compared to JSON or XML without specialized tools.
  • Limited Built-in Support for Complex Data Types
    By default, Protobuf does not provide comprehensive support for handling complex data types like maps or unions compared to some other data serialization formats, requiring workarounds.
  • Tooling Requirement
    Using Protobuf necessitates a compilation step where `.proto` files are converted into code, requiring additional tooling and build system integration.

Dhall Configuration Language videos

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Protobuf videos

StreamBerry, part 2 : introduction to Google ProtoBuf

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Dhall Configuration Language and Protobuf)
Configuration Management
61 61%
39% 39
Software Development
100 100%
0% 0
Mobile Apps
0 0%
100% 100
Developer Tools
64 64%
36% 36

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Dhall Configuration Language might be a bit more popular than Protobuf. We know about 91 links to it since March 2021 and only 83 links to Protobuf. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Dhall Configuration Language mentions (91)

  • Any program can be a GitHub Actions shell
    I'll give a shot at some guiding principals: 1. Do not use yaml. All github action logic should be written in a language that compiles to yaml, for example dhall (https://dhall-lang.org/). Yaml is an awful language for programmers, and it's a worse language for non-programmers. It's good for no one. 2. To the greatest extent possible, do not use any actions which install things. For example, don't use... - Source: Hacker News / 26 days ago
  • StrictYAML
    I'm a fan of anything that moves us away from stringly typed nonsense. See also Dhall (which can render to yaml). I like the idea but found the veneer broke a little too often and left me squinting at Haskell. https://dhall-lang.org/. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • Some Programming Language Ideas
    I think you're asking for Starlark (https://starlark-lang.org), a language that strongly resembles Python but isn't Turing-complete, originally designed at Google for use in their build system. There's also Dhall (https://dhall-lang.org), which targets configuration use cases; I'm less familiar with it. One problem is that, while non-Turing-completeness can be helpful for maintainability, it's not really... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • 8 months of OCaml after 8 years of Haskell in production
    > Lambda calculus is as pure as can be, and also has terms that don't normalize. That is not considered a side effect. Many typed lambda calculi do normalise. You can also have a look https://dhall-lang.org/ for some pragmatic that normalises. > A better example of impurity in Haskell for pragmatic's sake is the trace function, that can be used to print debugging information from pure functions. Well, but that's... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Thoughts on ThoughtWorks Radar 2024
    I was first turned onto Pkl during my Dhall Trough of Disillusionment phase (Dhall is cool, but man is it hard) by James Ward. It looked to be a language that had enough types to compile YAML/JSON configuration files wayyyy more safely. I’ve had enough YAML/JSON misconfigurations break production, that I started looking into ways to compile those problems away, and Dhall helped a lot, but the learning curve and... - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
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Protobuf mentions (83)

  • JSON vs Protocol Buffers vs FlatBuffers: A Deep Dive
    Protocol Buffers, developed by Google, is a compact and efficient binary serialization format designed for high-performance data exchange. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Developing games on and for Mac and Linux
    Protocol Buffers: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Adding Codable conformance to Union with Metaprogramming
    ProtocolBuffers’ OneOf message addresses the case of having a message with many fields where at most one field will be set at the same time. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Logcat is awful. What would you improve?
    That's definitely the bigger thing. I think something like Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) is what you're looking for there. Output the data and consume it by something that can handle the analysis. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Bitcoin is the "narrow waist" of internet-based value
    These protocols prevent an O(N x M) explosion of code that have to solve for many cases. For example, since JSON is an almost ubiquitous format for wire transfer (although other things do exist like protobufs), if I had N data formats that I want to serialize, I only need to write N serializers/deserializers (SerDes). If there was no such narrow waist and there were M alternatives to JSON in wide usage, I would... Source: over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Dhall Configuration Language and Protobuf, you can also consider the following products

YAML - YAML 1.2 --- YAML: YAML Ain't Markup Language

gRPC - Application and Data, Languages & Frameworks, Remote Procedure Call (RPC), and Service Discovery

Jsonnet - A powerful DSL for elegant description of JSON data.

Messagepack - An efficient binary serialization format.

JSON - (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format

Apache Thrift - An interface definition language and communication protocol for creating cross-language services.