structopt VS docopt.rs

Hope you are aware that structopt is in maintenance mode and is merged into clap as of v3.

As I understood you need to implement a command line argument parser for that you can use clap https://github.com/clap-rs/clap or structopt https://github.com/TeXitoi/structopt.

I feel like discovering moves like this is a weakness in the ecosystem today. You can check out some of our discussion on raising visibility

Something I've been giving thought to is how to help structopt users discover that clap3 is their upgrade path. We've put notices in the structopt repo but cargo upgrade and docs.rs won't say anything. See https://github.com/TeXitoi/structopt/issues/525 for more ideas we're considering.

For myself, I have found serde.rs really useful for undertanding their derives while I've always been frustrated with finding anything in structopt's documentation, so I modeled it more off of serde. This ended up both being in structure and not being in docs.rs. I think it really was the structure that was the frustration point for me but there was interest elsewhere in moving stuff out of docs.rs.

I think it would be nice to have a comparison to clap-derive and/or structopt in the README, as that is what I expect most users would compare this to. The subcommand handling looks especially cumbersome compared to deriving on structs and enums.

However, the one place I'm a little curious to rewrite things is the CLI... every time we have to deal with cobra I long for Rust's structopt.

Have you tried https://github.com/TeXitoi/structopt ?

It is written in Rust using the structopt and swayipc crates. It is published on crates.io. The repository is hosted on GitLab. The repository is mirrored on GitHub.

I use structopt, which itself uses clap.

Consider using clap or possibly structopt instead.

It's a lovely way to internalize the CLI argument cultural norms, decrease confusing and verbose argument parsing, make argument parsing work-free for the developer, and make argument parsing a copy-paste across languages. There's no greater pleasure than iteratively adding options to your program by just adding a line of text

-n, --new-option Do something new

I honestly think making a docopt parser is just very hard, which may limit its future prospects.

[the docopt rust repo.]: https://github.com/docopt/docopt.rs

Ditto, I guess? :P (But obviously with the position on the Unlicense flipped.)

To address your indictment head-on: you suggesting the 0BSD as a better alternative is really missing my point. The 0BSD is not an alternative for my use case. The Unlicense is one of the very few overt "political" acts that I inject into the software I produce. Its purpose is to make a statement. The 0BSD doesn't do that IMO, so it's not actually an alternative that meets my advocacy goal.

You and Rick Moen seem to have the same apparent blind spot for this. See my conversation with him that started here (which might also clarify some aspects of my own position): https://github.com/docopt/docopt.rs/issues/1#issuecomment-42...

And finally, note that my dual licensing scheme is exactly a response to the "problems pointed out by quite a few people": https://github.com/BurntSushi/byteorder/issues/26

I like Docopt for quick scripts, used it both in Python and Rust projects. It is quite unflexible though.

The Rust Docopt implementation¹ was deprecated this year, which is probably good because clap v3 (https://github.com/clap-rs/clap) is so awesome. In a project of mine (tealdeer), I noticed that docopt.rs was responsible for the huge majority of CPU instructions when running the binary: https://github.com/dbrgn/tealdeer/issues/106#issuecomment-59... I then switched² to clap and shaved off almost a megabyte from the release binary³. Performance improved as well, time required for rendering a tldr page went down from ~15.9 ms to ~12.4 ms⁴. With the migration, we also managed to reduce a lot of custom validation logic and move this logic into the derive macro attributes.

¹ https://github.com/docopt/docopt.rs