Hey all,
I’ve just released the latest version of my library, Cova v0.8.0, and figured it’s a good time to share it here.
Cova is a cross-platform command line argument parsing library for Zig. My design focus for this library has been simple integration into any project with deep, robust customization if needed. A few standout features include:
- Command, Option, and Value Types that all arguments are parsed to. These types can each be configured during comptime in a standardized way to meet the needs of a project.
- Those Types can be converted from and to Structs, Unions, and Functions for easy integration with existing code, or created from scratch for more customization.
- The library is POSIX compliant by default, but can easily be configured to match different argument styles.
If you’d like to check it out, the above link is a good starting point along with the API Docs, Guides, and this Basic App example. (Due to a 2 link limit, I couldn’t link the API Docs and Guides, but they can be found on the GitHub link.)
Hopefully this can help you in your next CLI project, and if you do check it out any feedback is greatly appreciated!
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Welcome to the forum @00JCIV00, and thanks for sharing your work!
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I just realised I’m doing basically the same thing lol! Yours is much more complete though. Good work!
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Appreciate that. Also, there’s no harm in having options! If you want to pass a link to yours, I can put it in the “Alternatives” section of Cova’s readme.
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I’ve just finished up Cova’s v0.9.0 release. This version adds new ways to customize your CLI projects and better ways to parse input from end users. It also fixes several issues and introduces some great optimizations for binary size and memory usage. Details below:
v0.9.0
New Features
- Implemented Argument Groups to help organize Arguments for Usage/Help messages and analysis.
- Implemented Aliases for Commands & Options and Value Child Types.
- Added more methods to make analyzing Arguments even easier.
- Added customizable Callback Functions and new Formatting options for Usage/Help messages.
- Implemented Mandatory Options with the new
mandatory field.
- Implemented Option Termination which is configurable under
cova.ParseConfig.
- Revamped the handling of Values with an Enum Child Type to make them seamless to work with.
- Revamped Conversions for fields w/ default values.
- Tested on additional platforms.
- Updated Installation to use the new
zig fetch --save.
- Updated the Docs and Guides with more features and examples.
Breaking
- Changed the
get, check, and match methods for analyzing Options & Values to use Argument Groups.
- Added new
global_ and child_type_ prefixes for certain fields.
- Added Allocator parameter requirement for all Callback Functions.
Fixes & Optimizations
- Fixed bug with Long Option parsing.
- Fixed bug with Boolean Value parsing.
- Fixed Alignment Issue on ARM devices.
- Fixed bug with
Command.Custom.getVals().
- Fixed bug with
Command.Custom.to() parsing.
- Fixed Zig removal of
meta.trait.
- Fixed Zig “local variable is never mutated” errors.
- Removed several unnecessary, erroneous uses of
const and @constCast().
- Optimized the default size of the
Value.Generic Union and added customization options allowing for much smaller binaries.
- Optimized parts of Argument Initialization/De-initialization.
Of note, this version was originally meant to focus on Manpage & Tab Completion Script Generation. The feature list and fixes above became large enough to warrant their own release, so the doc/script generation has been pushed to be the sole focus of the next release.
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After the v0.9.0 update I got some great feedback on the Readme for the repo. I’ve given it a facelift to try and make the library more approachable. As always, continued feedback is greatly appreciated!
v0.9.1
- Revamped the Readme to be more concise and readable.
- Updated for Zig Build API changes.
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