picocli

Picocli allows using a compiler annotation processor to generate classes at compile time instead [0]. [0]: https://github.com/remkop/picocli/blob/main/picocli-codegen/...

I use it but you have misunderstood what it does. It builds a model in memory and then you can use that to do other tasks at build time. It doesn't persist the model in a form that the app itself can use to start up faster. See here: https://github.com/remkop/picocli/issues/539 Although looking over that issue, it looks like maybe reflection was never proven to be the source of the slowdowns.

https://github.com/remkop/picocli "Picocli is a one-file framework for creating Java command line applications with almost zero code. Picocli aims to be the easiest way to create rich command line applications that can run on and off the JVM. Picocli supports a variety of command line syntax styles including POSIX, GNU, MS-DOS and more. It generates highly customizable usage help messages with ANSI colors and styles. Picocli-based applications can have command line TAB completion showing available options, option parameters and subcommands, for any level of nested subcommands. Picocli-based applications can be ahead-of-time compiled to a GraalVM native image, with extremely fast startup time and lower memory requirements, which can be distributed as a single executable file. Picocli generates beautiful documentation for your application (

People write CLI apps in Go because they want a single native executable to distribute. GraalVM + picocli can do that and much more! Colors, autocompletion, subcommands, dependency injection, you name it... Try it: https://picocli.info Disclaimer: I’m the author of picocli (https://github.com/remkop/picocli).

My biggest beef with idiomatic Java code is that it is so annotation-based. For example, I recently had to do a small CLI app in Java, and the command line parser library that came up in searches was picocli. Now, I mean no offence to the creators of picocli, it's pretty typical of most java code in my experience, but why does it have to do everything via annotations? Take their example for instance: https://github.com/remkop/picocli#example Not sure why a "just plain data" approach couldn't have been taken so that instead of: @Option(names = { "-v", "--verbose" }, description = "Verbose mode.") private boolean[] verbose = new boolean[0]; You could've had something more... Option<boolean[]> verbose = Option.<boolean[]>newBuilder() .names("-v", "--verbose") .description("Verbose mode.")

I say go ahead. If you want to improve an existing product nothing is stopping you. Go for it! https://github.com/remkop/picocli/wiki/FAQ#aren-t-you-just-r...