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I wonder if anyone would take me seriously if I suggested WASM as a configuration language. When run, the WASM would be given imports that provide a small API for manipulating the config DOM, and importing and executing further WASM files. Then you can use whatever high-level config language you want (or, say, a subset of Rust) and compile it to WASM.

Existing JSON/YAML/etc could be compiled to WASM that simply builds the corresponding DOM.

Funny joke?

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I think this is what the zellij terminal multiplexer uses for extensions.

It's worth mentioning that in the opposite direction, if you wanted to have an interpreted config option with fewer compile steps, there's also the option to use lua — a language for which the compiler itself is quite small and portable

See,

[1] : https://zellij.dev

using wasm goes into crazy territory imo. It would probably be bigger, and opaque, with no proper errors (unless you compile debug info which would make it much bigger).

I think we already have an almost perfect language i.e. Lua Everyone knows it (or can learn it easily). tiny runtime to embed. sandboxed by default. garbage collected. Only feature missing is static typing.

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