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Fang, the CLI Starter Kit

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Re: Fang, the CLI Starter Kit

#11

Post by [deleted] »

neomantra wrote: post #8
csomar wrote: post #3

I’ve been maintaining rust-starter[!] for quite sometime now. It is kind of the equivalent of fang but for Rust. It uses Clap which is the equivalent of Cobra; though I don’t think Clap has the same kind of fancy output? Throughout these years, I have found that cross-compiling is the most challenging part of creating a CLI. When you are building a web back-end, you control the execution environment (usually linux).…

Golang itself bundles a toolchain and can cross compile to a many target OSes and architectures. I use Goreleaser [1] to create GitHub releases, Homebrew packages, Docker images, and Linux packages. Goreleaser Pro can also create MSI packages. ETA since I just saw Christian chime in: the Goreleaser author works at Charm.sh =) [1] https://goreleaser.com

[deleted]

Re: Fang, the CLI Starter Kit

#12

Post by threemux »

csomar wrote: post #3

I’ve been maintaining rust-starter[!] for quite sometime now. It is kind of the equivalent of fang but for Rust. It uses Clap which is the equivalent of Cobra; though I don’t think Clap has the same kind of fancy output? Throughout these years, I have found that cross-compiling is the most challenging part of creating a CLI. When you are building a web back-end, you control the execution environment (usually linux).…

Wow TIL cross compilation is a bit of a pain in Rust. I assumed it was as easy as Go. I can confirm as long as you're using pure Go (no cgo), it's as easy as setting $GOOS and $GOARCH appropriately.

Re: Fang, the CLI Starter Kit

#13

Post by paulddraper »

threemux wrote: post #12
csomar wrote: post #3

I’ve been maintaining rust-starter[!] for quite sometime now. It is kind of the equivalent of fang but for Rust. It uses Clap which is the equivalent of Cobra; though I don’t think Clap has the same kind of fancy output? Throughout these years, I have found that cross-compiling is the most challenging part of creating a CLI. When you are building a web back-end, you control the execution environment (usually linux).…

Wow TIL cross compilation is a bit of a pain in Rust. I assumed it was as easy as Go. I can confirm as long as you're using pure Go (no cgo), it's as easy as setting $GOOS and $GOARCH appropriately.

The difficulty is due to Rust dynamically linking and Go statically linking. The former requires the system libs.

That said, I am unfamiliar with any licensing for Windows builds.

MacOS has some niche (usually discarded) technicalities like you can only use the SDK on Apple hardware.

Re: Fang, the CLI Starter Kit

#14

Post by christianrocha »

neomantra wrote: post #8
csomar wrote: post #3

I’ve been maintaining rust-starter[!] for quite sometime now. It is kind of the equivalent of fang but for Rust. It uses Clap which is the equivalent of Cobra; though I don’t think Clap has the same kind of fancy output? Throughout these years, I have found that cross-compiling is the most challenging part of creating a CLI. When you are building a web back-end, you control the execution environment (usually linux).…

Golang itself bundles a toolchain and can cross compile to a many target OSes and architectures. I use Goreleaser [1] to create GitHub releases, Homebrew packages, Docker images, and Linux packages. Goreleaser Pro can also create MSI packages. ETA since I just saw Christian chime in: the Goreleaser author works at Charm.sh =) [1] https://goreleaser.com

GoReleaser is indeed an awesome tool and we use it for every applicable project.

And actually Carlos, who builds GoReleaser, is the true author of Fang and took it from concept to execution.

Re: Fang, the CLI Starter Kit

#16

Post by threemux »

paulddraper wrote: post #13
threemux wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow TIL cross compilation is a bit of a pain in Rust. I assumed it was as easy as Go. I can confirm as long as you're using pure Go (no cgo), it's as easy as setting $GOOS and $GOARCH appropriately.

The difficulty is due to Rust dynamically linking and Go statically linking. The former requires the system libs. That said, I am unfamiliar with any licensing for Windows builds. MacOS has some niche (usually discarded) technicalities like you can only use the SDK on Apple hardware.

I think that's a reference to the use of Docker in the "cross" tool that makes cross compilation easier but I'm not certain

Re: Fang, the CLI Starter Kit

#17

Post by assbuttbuttass »

jonpalmisc wrote: post #10

Stubborn complaint (and maybe a hot take): I dislike CLIs that try to be overly pretty. I don't receive any tangible benefit as the user from the "fancy" (their words) help output. I'd much rather simple plain text output that looks like all the other tools I already use.

agreed, plain text is more scriptable too. Let me pipe it into awk!

Re: Fang, the CLI Starter Kit

#18

Post by caarlos0 »

assbuttbuttass wrote: post #17
jonpalmisc wrote: post #10

Stubborn complaint (and maybe a hot take): I dislike CLIs that try to be overly pretty. I don't receive any tangible benefit as the user from the "fancy" (their words) help output. I'd much rather simple plain text output that looks like all the other tools I already use.

agreed, plain text is more scriptable too. Let me pipe it into awk!

If you do it right, you can output plain text when stdout is not a tty - which is something fang does, fwiw :)

Re: Fang, the CLI Starter Kit

#19

Post by arp242 »

jonpalmisc wrote: post #10

Stubborn complaint (and maybe a hot take): I dislike CLIs that try to be overly pretty. I don't receive any tangible benefit as the user from the "fancy" (their words) help output. I'd much rather simple plain text output that looks like all the other tools I already use.

Alignment (and maybe bold text for some things) is all you need in >95% of cases, IMHO.

One of the downsides of a lot of these tools is that's exactly what they don't do well: many things don't align or wrap nicely.

For example, here's a comparison of this fang library vs one where I just raw-dogged the usage text: https://imgur.com/a/QWh9TLD – the nice alignment does a lot more than colours. Especially for larger programs with a bunch of flags it can be such a pain. For example from an otherwise quite nice tool: https://imgur.com/a/RELL9Gk – you just completely lose any "overview".

I did spend some time on some better tooling to improve all of this, because manually writing these isn't super-fun either, but not so straight-forward to do well (or at least: not in a way that I like).

Re: Fang, the CLI Starter Kit

#20

Post by arp242 »

caarlos0 wrote: post #18
assbuttbuttass wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agreed, plain text is more scriptable too. Let me pipe it into awk!

If you do it right, you can output plain text when stdout is not a tty - which is something fang does, fwiw :)

It still tries to put the terminal in raw mode or something. "cmd | less" doesn't work and requires "stty sane". I didn't investigate, but FYI.
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