Writing Non-Go Providers

There has been a lot of interest in writing providers using languages other than Go, and people frequently ask for information on how to go about doing that. The Terraform team's policy at this time is that while it is technically possible to write providers in languages other than Go, our tooling, documentation, and ecosystem will all assume your provider is being written in and distributed as Go code for the time being. This means we will not be writing any documentation on how to build a non-Go provider, nor will we be providing support or answering questions about it.

While it is possible to write a non-Go provider, thanks to Terraform's use of the gRPC protocol, it is harder than it may appear at first glance. Multiple packages, from encoders and decoders to Terraform's type system, would all need to be reimplemented in that new language. The Plugin SDK would also need to be reimplemented, which is not a trivial challenge. And the way non-Go providers would interact with the Registry, terraform init, and other pieces of the Terraform ecosystem is unclear.

At this point, our efforts are focused on providing the best development experience for Terraform providers written in Go that we can. The Terraform provider development experience is still evolving aggressively, as is Terraform's interface for providers. We may reconsider this policy once there is a more stable interface to build on and our development experience with Go has matured and evolved sufficiently.