What is the best language/framework to write CLIs in 2018? | Hacker News Reader

What is the best language/framework to write CLIs in 2018?

4 pointswawhal14 comments

Hello HN,

I have an idea for a CLI and want to start writing it soon. I want a robust language/framework that is meant for writing CLIs. I have used Golang/Cobra before and I have done minor things using C++.

I also want this to be a learning experience. So I will be starting with the language/framework from absolute scratch.

So the secondary question behind this Ask HN is, which CLI framework should you know in 2018?

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It depends largely on what you're doing, and where it will be running.

If you're writing something that takes a bunch of flags, then parses text, I'd use perl. If you're using somethign that must be easily installed on 100+ hosts then perhaps a binary compiled from go - because that's easy to install.

For frameworks? That's probably secondary to the actual core of your application. If you're writing a complex UI with (n)curses then that's more interesting and complex than calling getopt a few times..

I know you’ve used Go, but I personally think it’s unbeatable mostly because it’s statically compiled binaries make them super portable. Compile once and you can distribute a single binary file per platform.

Granted, I've only ever written CLI apps using this and nothing else, but I've written a few smaller CLI apps in C# using https://github.com/commandlineparser/commandline and found the library to be a pleasure to work with.

I write all my CLIs in Python.

I find that I always need various random things to work together and have always found Python to be the most robust at this. Plus it has pretty much anything you'd need already implemented.

Type safety is important to me. So not going for python.

Otherwise python is the go-to because of the libs.

> Type safety is important to me.

Isn't that what mypy is for?

In terms of portability and installed base Python or Perl probably are the best choices. They come installed with most UNIX, BSD or UNIX-like operating systems such as Linux.

Python can feel sluggish due to slower startup time so I would skip that and use either Perl or Go.

Definitely Perl for UNIXy stuff.

Perl or Go for sure.

Never used Perl. Would love to learn it. Just went through the overview. Looks like a high-level scripting language which inherits a lot from C.

After all the research, I am still highly inclined towards Golang. Since you said "Perl or Go", you seem to have used Golang. How does Perl compare with it?

Perl has decades worth of high quality libraries to do heavy lifting. https://metacpan.org You can get away with easy scripting for creating significant programs.

UNIX commandline and Perl is a match made in heaven.

Using Golang will demand significantly more effort when doing more complex stuff but will give you concurrency, easier deploys/multi-platform support and better performance if doing CPU intensive stuff.

I use Go for what I previously maybe used C for.

Thanks to the quick compile time and good tooling Go almost feels like a scripting language when developing but especially for UNIXy stuff it can't replace Perl for me.

For learning I would highly recommend the following books:

  Beginning Perl by Ovid.
  Modern Perl by chromatic.

There are a lot of other good Perl books but some of them are getting old and it is better to already know a bit before reading so one can separate good from dated etc.

Nice. Thanks.

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