Kick-ass CLI Tools In Swift
Programmers whine about ergonomics partially because we are previlidged and spoiled. But mostly because our attention is a limited resources. Mixing API conventions distracts us from solving the problem at hand. Bad ergonomics, therefore, drives away a good potion of users who cares about quality of their tools.
[…]
File system APIs being in
Foundationas opposed to the standard library is probably a temporary condition. Nevertheless, it has at least the following implications[…][…]
The next killer CLI tool is still more likely to be written in Go or Rust, than in Swift. Hopefully, somewhere in these speculations is a true cause of this phenomena. Maybe someone reading this will be inspired to accelerate change that will eventually revert the condition.
Still, Swift+Foundation works pretty well for writing simple CLI tools to aid in my Mac development and maintenance. And swift-sh (via Mattt Thompson) looks like it will help.
Previously: @dynamicCallable: Unix Tools as Swift Functions.
Update (2019-01-24): Florent Pillet:
So Vapor has another hidden gem: a pretty cool framework to build CLI apps, so I can reuse Vapor add-ons from the ecosystem to write my own local tools.
No terribly well documented, but worth a look.
2 Comments RSS · Twitter
"Still, Swift+Foundation works pretty well for writing simple CLI tools"
Just out of curiosity, how do you handle/parse command options (short and long) in your Swift command line tools?
I always found the suggested solutions to be painful and incompatible across the Swift versions I tried.
Also the size of the command line tools built with Swift was an issue (compared to C/Obj-C versions).
@Stephane I think you’re right that there isn’t a good way to do that, but my tools are simple enough that I don’t need an argument parsing library, and the binary size isn’t an issue because (for convenience) just run the text directly like a script.
