[jerf]

Go's flag package is covered by the backwards compatibility promise, and no large-scale change is going to be accepted. Pushing proposals to it is a waste of time.

But it doesn't need to be changed. Nothing stops anyone from using any of the several argument parsers for Go. The one included in the standard library is just that and nothing more: included in the standard library. It is not privileged in any manner (beyond that brute fact), it has no access to any sort of internal standard-library only functionality that gives it access to performance external packages can't have, it isn't particularly integrated forcibly into anything else included with Go, it is not mandatory, it is not even something the community deeply believes must be used and anyone who uses alternate mechanisms is violating any sort of nebulous community standard. It's just a package.

This is one of those cases where people often rather casually say "I don't like how Go handles X", or, indeed, any language with a standard library (this is not a Go-specific problem) when they really ought to say something more like "I don't like how the standard library flags package in Go handles X". But it's not the language doing it, it's the library. For a non-Go example that I've encountered in the wild, it isn't really appropriate to say "I don't like Python's GUI", referring to the built-in Tkinter binding. It's just a library. Python's got a dozen other choices, including direct bindings to every major toolkit in every major OS. It's not "Python's GUI", it's just one that ships in the standard library, not the sum total of all of Python's GUI capability.

[Mawr]

Could not disagree more. Everything that affects your use of a language is that language - the standard library, the ecosystem, the community, the documentation, the tooling, every single thing.

The standard library is special. It sets the blessed way to do X, e.g. Context, the Writer and Reader interfaces, etc. Claiming that you may as well write your own is like claiming you can just fork Linux if you disagree with its direction. Good luck with that.

Bringing up Python is particularly unfortunate since its packaging story sucks, so whether a package is included in its stdlib or not really matters.

Sure, argv parsing is an isolated piece of functionality, so in that specific case it doesn't really matter what package you use, but the sentiment is incredibly wrong in general.

[naikrovek]

You imagined that I was saying that the existing flag stuff in the standard library should be replaced, I never suggested that.

You can add better things without breaking compatibility promises. See: many, many features added since 1.0. New IP address types, slog, etc.

[jerf]

People are not looking to "add" to the library. They don't like it at all and want to completely stop it from doing what it does. There is no proposal process that is going to make them happy.

Fortunately, that is not a prerequisite for their happiness.