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I often see people recommend Go for CLI apps but I'm not sure why. The built-in `flag` package is really limiting. These days I mostly use Rust with `clap` which is the nicest flag-parsing experience I've found so far in any language.

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Are you using "clap" because the "built-in" one in rust is not good? :P

There is no "built-in" command line parser in Rust. All it has is std::env::args (https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/env/fn.args.html) and std::env::args_os (https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/env/fn.args_os.html), which give you the raw command line. Rust does not follow the "batteries included" philosophy for its base standard library, to avoid "leaking batteries" problems like seen for instance with Python (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19948642).

I know there is no flag library built-in in rust (I do quite a lot of rust as well as go). That's my whole point. It should be compared to something like https://github.com/urfave/cli . That would be a fairer comparison.

Sure, for example I usually use Cobra. But what I meant was that people often mention Go as being explicitly preferable to Rust for CLIs, and I’m not sure why if I have to pull in a dependency in either case.

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