[enhancement]: compiled language wishlist

[holmanb]

Enhancement

Python has the benefits of expressive syntax, a strong ecosystem, a strong community, and wide platform support.

A major downside of Python is that it is slow to initialize. This makes it ill-suited for performance-critical operations. Where performance-critical code is required, cloud-init uses POSIX shell, which enjoys broad platform support however leaves much to desire in terms of syntax and maintainability.

A wishlist of components that would be desirable to write in a compiled language:

• ds-identify: this crucial tool is used by cloud-init to identify which platform it is running on. This tool must read / write YAML and do various local filesystem operations and systemd runs it as a generator to enable cloud-init.
• socket protocol: this protocol enables running cloud-init as a single process, but requires a shim services to send and receive from a unix socket in order to propagate return codes to the individual services