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Comment by Phylter | Hacker News Reader

If I'm writing a command line application then, most of the time, I just want to let the user know what's going on. It doesn't always have to be fancy and I don't want to track down a third party library to tell the user all went well and give basic statistics. I'd go ballistic if I had to download a library to print out "35 records processed." It just doesn't make sense.

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Then use std.debug.warn?

Quoting the docs linked above:

> Usually you don't want to write to stdout. You want to write to stderr. And you don't care if it fails. It's more like a warning message that you want to emit. For that you can use a simpler API:

    const warn = @import("std").debug.warn;
    
    pub fn main() void {
        warn("Hello, world!\n");
    }

The message "35 records processed" isn't a warning, nor should it necessarily go to stderr.

Tools following the UNIX philosophy pride themselves on only bothering the user with output messages when something goes wrong.

You can still write that message to strout, there just isn't a brief "print" function.

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