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Polyglot CLI Strategy

This document outlines the architectural strategy for creating a family of TofuSoup command-line interfaces across multiple languages, ensuring a consistent developer experience and robust, symmetric testing capabilities.

1. Core Principle: Feature Parity

The primary goal is to achieve feature parity between the main Python-based soup CLI and its counterparts in other languages, starting with Go (soup-go). This means that where applicable, a developer should be able to use the same commands, subcommands, and flags in soup-go as they would in soup.

This creates a predictable and powerful ecosystem where developers can use the tools in their preferred language, and the testing suite can validate Python components against Go components using an identical set of commands.

2. Go Implementation: soup-go

The Go implementation of the TofuSoup CLI will be named soup-go and will be built using the Cobra library to provide a robust and familiar CLI structure. The existing Go harnesses (go-cty, go-hcl, etc.) will be refactored and integrated into this single, unified soup-go binary.

Target soup-go Structure

The soup-go CLI will mirror the structure of the Python soup CLI.

Hypothetical soup-go --help Output: 

A Go implementation of the TofuSoup conformance and utility toolkit.

Usage:
  soup-go [command]

Available Commands:
  cty         Utilities for CTY data (view, convert, validate)
  hcl         Utilities for HCL file processing (view, convert)
  rpc         Utilities for testing RPC components (kv get, kv put)
  wire        Tools for encoding/decoding Terraform Wire Protocol objects
  help        Help about any command

Flags:
  -h, --help          help for soup-go
      --log-level string   Set the logging level (default "info")

3. Role in Conformance Testing

This strategy transforms the Go harnesses from simple, single-purpose test executables into a full-featured, language-specific implementation of the TofuSoup toolkit. This enables a powerful, symmetric testing model:

  • Python vs. Go: The soup test command can invoke soup-go to get canonical outputs for comparison.
  • Go vs. Python: A future Go-based test runner could invoke the Python soup CLI to validate Go components.

This ensures that the entire toolchain, not just the underlying libraries, is conformant across languages.