New argument parsing library

September 09, 2020

A few years ago I made simon - a rust library for parsing command-line arguments. Looking at it with fresh eyes, I’ve decided that it’s over-engineered, and places too much emphasis on generality and theoretical niceness rather than being useful.

Today I started working on args_af which is my attempt at making a minimal, pragmatic command-line parser. The biggest difference from simon is combinators only work on specific parsers, rather than generalising to all parsers. It’s done this way to simplify generating help messages. Like simon, it uses the idea of “Applicative Functors” (hence the “af”), but it’s less in-your-face about it, and only really uses them to combine a collection of parsers into a single parser of a collection of values.