cligen

If a little CLI app to do something useful (instead of say, some shell script/batch file or something) is your entry point then you might try cligen [1]. Everyone is different, but from many and varied reports (e.g. in this very thread [2]), it is hugely more probable that you get up & running with some basic skills in like 30 minutes to 4 hours or so with Nim than you would with Rust. Nim really seems to "scale up gracefully" for most. [1] https://github.com/c-blake/cligen [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25596285

At least one (very bottom of [1]) of the 5+ variants makes you list which fields the code gets access to (in a tiny 6 line Nim macro). That is an alternate, perhaps more keystroke-heavy solution to the problem bothering @simias. [1] https://github.com/c-blake/cligen/blob/master/cligen/macUt.n...

It depends how good/low level a programmer you are, but it's really not that hard to spin up your own impl. I did an (incomplete) Python multiprocessing like dealio in like 100 lines of code (https://github.com/c-blake/cligen/blob/master/cligen/procpoo...) just to make my `only.nim` run faster because libmagic/file are so CPU intensive. So, one way to annihilate your worries is to just roll your own.

Nim is indeed a great answer for this. Should you want to give that script a nice, traditional CLI then you can do so with very low effort using https://github.com/c-blake/cligen Should you want "script like" edit-test development cycle ergonomics you can use the TinyCC/tcc backend for compiles in ~200..300 milliseconds. Once it's how you like it you can compile with gcc & -d:danger for max performance in deployment.

func-argparse seems much like https://pypi.org/project/argh/ the inspiration for the Nim https://github.com/c-blake/cligen which can source its "pseudo specification" from either a proc signature or a type/object definition.

I was wondering the same thing. Perhaps he means all the extra "fire::" annotations one needs to put in place in function parameter lists as well as the ultimate dispatcher instatiating cpp macro? Really there is always at least 2.5 with the #include <fire.h>, later macro and annotations. https://github.com/c-blake/cligen achieves the actual 1-line of code dream without extra annotations and even leveraging existing API documentation and even colorizing said rST docs in terminal generated help output. { Of course, that one line might be an "import cligen; dispatch(foo)" which is arguably denser than most people would format it. } One usually wants to add some per-parameter help, though, unless your parameter names are always much more descriptive than "x" and "y".

Agreed vis a vis SHIFT. cligen also has a global config file [1] to control syntax options like whether '-c=val' requires an '=' (and if it should be '=' or ':', etc.) which has been discussed here, various colorization/help rendering controls, etc. Shell scripts can always export CLIGEN=/dev/null to force more strict and/or default modes. [1] https://github.com/c-blake/cligen/wiki/Example-Config-File

I feel like argh and plac preceded/inspired Click. Also, it's not Python but in Nim there is https://github.com/c-blake/cligen which also does spellcheck/typo suggestions, and allows --kebab-case --camelCase or --snake_case for long options, among other bells & whistles.