pico-args

An ultra simple CLI arguments parser.

• Only flags, options and free arguments are supported.
• Arguments can be separated by a space or =.
• No help generation.
• No combined flags (like -vvv or -abc).

Alternatives

The core idea of pico-args is to provide some "sugar" for arguments parsing without a lot of overhead (binary or compilation time wise). There are no point in comparing parsing features, because pico-args supports only the bare minimum. So we will compare only the size overhead and compilation time.

There are a lot of arguments parsing implementations, but we will use only two:

• clap - is the most popular and complete one
• gumdrop - a simple parser that uses procedural macros

| Feature | pico-args | clap | gumdrop | ---|---|---|--- | Binary overhead | 18.9KiB | 435.1KiB | 23KiB | | Build time | 0.9s | 15s | 31s | | Tested version | 0.1.0 | 2.33.0 | 0.6.0 |

• Binary size overhead was measured by subtracting the .text section size of an app with arguments parsing and a hello world app.
• Build time was measured using hyperfine 'cargo clean; cargo build --release'.
• Test projects can be found in examples/.

License

MIT