I have been contemplating adding a small DSL that compiles to Ansible, as i find writing Ansible config files very tedious and boring. As its just YAML, it should be quite easy to generate the output.

I know of one Ansible config file: ansible.cfg. Are you talking about the config files that you deploy to the servers?

sorry, I call the YAML playbooks config files sometimes. but yes, something that can compile down to the YAML files or other tools as well. Abstract away the abstraction basically.

Same here. We should create an efficient compiled version of Ansible, same feature set much faster execution, single configuration file flavor (only yaml)

My idea is different. Instead of playbook yaml, playbook go source, that compiles to a fat binary that is transferred over ssh. That decreases the dependencies to ssh only on the target hosts (no python). The framework would include an idempotent API that matches all the tasks that Ansible provides.

Yes, you are thinking about the same. I would just use YAML for the things that can be configured.

Is execution speed really an issue? Unless you're parsing millions of lines of YAML, it's difficult to believe that's a bottleneck.

I reckon a good benefit would be static typing and intellisense.

It is, Ansible is pretty slow at scale (100+ servers).