Why pure Go

go-hocon is one of a family of pure-Go config/data-format engines (alongside go-eyaml and go-augeas, which do belong to the Puppet ecosystem) that provide a well-known format as an ordinary Go library, with CGO_ENABLED=0 and no runtime dependency on a JVM or a C toolchain. HOCON itself is Lightbend/Typesafe Config's format, unrelated to Puppet — go-hocon is validated against the reference puppetlabs/ruby-hocon gem (itself a faithful Ruby port of Typesafe Config), not against anything in the Puppet language/runtime stack.

Static, portable, embeddable

Because it is pure Go and imports the Go standard library only, go-hocon compiles with cgo disabled, cross-compiles to every 64-bit Go target (amd64, arm64, riscv64, loong64, ppc64le, s390x) and to WebAssembly, and links into a single static binary. There is nothing to install alongside it — no shared library, no interpreter, no external process it must shell out to.

Testability by construction

Every interaction with the outside world — file access, the environment, the network — flows through an injectable seam. That means both the happy path and every error branch are exercised deterministically against in-memory fixtures, which is how the project holds 100% coverage across operating systems and architectures from a single test suite, without special privileges.

An engine, not a framework

go-hocon exposes a small, stable Go API and does one thing well — syntax & config model — as a dependency-light library you embed, not a service or CLI you must stand up.