Hi everyone,

I'm glad to announce first major version of argparse - a library for creating command line interface. It took some time to figure out public API of this library and I believe it's mature enough for the major version.

If you don't know what argparse does, here is not complete list of features (see full list in readme):

• Positional arguments, short and long options
• Argument groups
• Subcommands
• Help text generation
• Shell completion

On Thursday, 9 June 2022 at 19:08:16 UTC, Andrey Zherikov wrote:

Congratulations on the release. Though there's a good number of libraries for this task in D already, this solution looks very complete.

I was wondering if you ran into any strong reasons for describing the arguments as a struct, rather than, well, function arguments. I have had good success so far with the latter, which has the benefit of being succinct:

https://github.com/CyberShadow/btdu/blob/116d190079ca77d61383eb738defa4318d5a1e5f/source/btdu/main.d#L59

On Friday, 10 June 2022 at 09:20:24 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:

I looked at them when I started this project and they didn't provide complete set of features I was looking for. That was the main reason to start this work.

This is an interesting approach. I think they are equivalent for simple cases but how would you model subcommands with common arguments for all of them?

On Friday, 10 June 2022 at 14:14:27 UTC, Andrey Zherikov wrote:

I invoke https://xkcd.com/927/ ! :)

Glad you asked! I use an approach similar to the one here, with commands in a struct. The common arguments are parsed before invoking the command.

https://github.com/CyberShadow/steamkeyactivator/blob/144d322ecee65f4f536e5fd4141837e51d61a27a/activator.d#L142

When only some commands need to share some arguments, you can put them in a tuple.

https://github.com/CyberShadow/Digger/blob/7c7dd167aea2214d594bab932ea4e41e5f0a357a/digger.d#L34

On Friday, 10 June 2022 at 14:20:15 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:

:-D
I tried to improve one of the existing libs but it didn't go well enough.

Now you have both approaches: parsing into struct with members and parsing into function arguments. Why do we need two if one is enough?

On Friday, 10 June 2022 at 15:57:40 UTC, Andrey Zherikov wrote:

Assuming you're talking about your time with JCLI then yeah, sorry.

If it's any consolation, there's yet another person trying to use the library that I'm currently disapointing ;^)

On Saturday, 11 June 2022 at 08:04:14 UTC, SealabJaster wrote:

Are you disappointed with jcli? Why? It's pretty good.

On Saturday, 11 June 2022 at 14:28:02 UTC, Andrey Zherikov wrote:

I believe SealabJaster was using a bit of self-deprecating humor; I don't believe he himself is disappointed in his library (well, no more than the usual amount of regret and loathing any sensible library writer has in their work...)

Jordan