pico-args 0.1.0

An ultra simple CLI arguments parser.
Documentation

pico-args

Build Status Crates.io Documentation

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