I dream of Helm adopting CUE as an option for chart templates and values. They are both written in Go, which makes the integration a possibility. I've played around with a wrapper that renders the CUE to to Yaml before running Helm, which effectively means helm is deploying hardcoded templates, lifting the values/templates merging out of Helm proper.

Have you tried https://timoni.sh/?

yes, see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40793260

Yes, but no concrete plans.

We already looked into pkl, but this would require every package author to either have Java (and pkl) running on their system or we would need to package the jre (and pkl) in order to make it work probably. But Kubernetes examples are already out there (https://github.com/apple/pkl-k8s-examples) and we are keeping an eye on it.

I don't believe that's true, they have pkl in other languages, too, and I double checked it doesn't require the jre https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40146077 (tl;dr = https://github.com/apple/pkl-go/blob/v0.6.0/.circleci/config... which shows both pkl-go as well as how they, themselves, use a single-binary in a circleci setup)

I haven't tried to integrate pkl-go into something like glasskube so I am open to that part being painful because software gonna software, but I believe the general statement of pkl being Java-only is incorrect

Same here. It's where I spend 90% of my time working with Helm charts and I absolutely despise it.