unix-history-repo VS clap-rs

There is also https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo (Continuous Unix commit history from 1970 until today)

FWIW, ls in Research-V6 back in 1975 had 10 options. https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc...

By BSD 3 in 1980 it had 11 options. https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-3-S...

The thing is, we can see even from the 1970s 'ls' how the Unix model doesn't meet the goal "to chain these simple programs together to create complex behaviors".

There is no option to escape or NUL terminate a filename, making it possible to construct a filename containing a newline which makes the output look like two file entries.

The option for that was added later.

There's also the issue that embedded terminal codes will be interpreted by the terminal.

This is what it looked like about 7-8 years earlier: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-1/e...

RA92 (1989): 16 ms / 8.3 ms.

Note that the RL02 (and V7) and RA92 mentioned in the article are separated by about a decade.

[1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc...

The earliest version I could find [1] is already written in C.

[1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc...

Here's a 1997 citation for "top cpu processes." It's not as close to the original 1984 release as I would like, but it's better than Wikipedia. https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/commit/aee34003d7964653c44c31f5bf6bcf136b32c4f3

> The “why” goes into the PR and more importantly, engineering documentation and inline comments

This just ensures that the “why” is lost when someone comes looking years later.

From experience, SCM metadata is far more durable than just about any other work product we produce. Five decades later and RCS commit info was still available for the Unix sources, and history could be reconstructed: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo

I’ve used 35-year-old commit messages to help understand a long-standing issue, decades after all other related organization tooling and data had disappeared.

P.S. I remember I looked into early versions of C (they survived in Unix historic releases) and that, finally, revealed to me why C does something really stupid and conflates arrays and slices (pointers). Initially C had no arrays! Or, rather, what it called arrays were, actually, pointers. “Normal” arrays were added at some point, but because these weird slices/pointers were already there that caused endless confusion. It wasn't resolved before C became popular and after that it was too late. Go repeated that mistake with slices, of course.

We will be using the library for Clap - A simple-to-use, efficient, and full-featured library for parsing command line arguments and subcommands.

I recently came across this question (and associated answer) on the clap repository. The answer given is a good one. But I wanted to expand with my own findings and practices, which spurred the motivation for this post.

We can also use tuple-like struct syntax and named-field struct syntax for enum variants within our enum; this is because unlike in other OOP languages, Rust enums are actually sum types. You can read more about how powerful Rust enums are in another article we wrote here. You can have optional arguments by simply wrapping the types in Option, but if you want to add a flag to a command you can use bool, since clap recognises that flags are either there or not there. Let's have a look at what this might look like:

I began by developing a wrapper for the CurseForge API, which turned out to be a lengthy and challenging process but constituted the bulk of the work. Next, I coded the CLI, which was relatively straightforward. Instead of using the clap crate, a Rust tool for generating CLIs, I opted for the following line of code:

By this time I had already gotten tired of parsing arguments by myself and had looked for something to help with that. I found a really dang good argument parsing library called clap. What makes it so cool is it's largely declarative for common uses. You simply mark up a struct with attributes, and the parser automatically generates the usage and all the argument parsing code.

How CLI arguments are handled (using clap).

Is this just referring to wrapping based on the terminal width? That is supported with the wrap_help feature though I have been considering making it a default feature.

CLI, use Clap. If you want to get fancy, use Tui.

As our CLI is getting more complex, we'll use the clap crate to parse the command line arguments.