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by blackrock 2311 days ago
I got annoyed when it didn’t have a decent standard library to handle command line flags and arguments.

The examples given so far, are mediocre.

parseopt is incredibly cumbersome.

docopt is an incredibly poor design, that I can’t believe anyone thought this was a good idea.

And failing to have such basic libraries, I realized, this language has a long way to go.

I contemplated building my own library to handle such a need, but why, this doesn’t solve my problem of building something. And if it’s missing such basic libraries, then what else is it missing? The odds were too great, and too risky for me to commit my time to it.

3 comments

There are many libraries for that, but I suggest cligen. It is the simplest command line parser I have found across all programming languages.
What if the Nim maintainers made some kind of continuous popularity measurement to let good libraries bubble up? Opens other problems I know, but may fix such scenario and accelerate Nim adoption?
There was an attempt a few months ago, but it was a little weird. But if you just want to find libraries relevant for your task (e.g. parsing the command line), there is https://nimble.directory where all Nim libraries are listed
I hadn't seen docopt before, but am curious why you think it's such a bad design.
you can try cligen and then argparse https://github.com/iffy/nim-argparse