Command line interfaces

[willow-ahrens]

It would be really helpful to have a section on command line tools, I know that there are:
https://github.com/carlobaldassi/ArgParse.jl
https://github.com/comonicon/Comonicon.jl
https://github.com/zachmatson/ArgMacros.jl

There's a blog post here:
https://work.sparktseung.com/pages/2022-01-02-Julia-Argparse/

There's the related issue of precompiling the CLI:
https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-packagecompile-argparse/31994/6
https://comonicon.org/stable/project/#Enable-System-Image

I was somewhat bewildered by this ecosystem, so I came to this website hoping for an opinionated answer.

[willow-ahrens]

also https://github.com/admercs/SimpleArgParse.jl

[gdalle]

A PR would be welcome, but I'm not sure which page this belongs to? Perhaps the time of the fourth page has arrived?

[willow-ahrens]

Maybe it's worth it to have a page on deployment, including packagcompiler, compiling apps, and argument parsing.

[willow-ahrens]

also: https://github.com/kmsquire/ArgParse2.jl and https://github.com/docopt/DocOpt.jl

[willow-ahrens]

also https://github.com/attractivechaos/Getopt.jl

[kescobo]

+1 for this suggestion. I'm just getting back into this again after a couple of years, and "bewildering" is definitely the right adjective. Note also the new (@main)(ARGS) entrypoint macro, and upcoming juliac, and it gets even worse

[willow-ahrens]

I suppose I can add my 2 cents here now: After considering all of these in a team where many developers are new to julia programming, I ultimately decided that docopt was the easiest to explain and use. Many of the other interfaces are very "magic", and use advanced features like macros or modules. I would have liked to use https://github.com/kmsquire/ArgParse2.jl because it is simple and many programmers are familiar with python's argparse, but the code is not feature complete.

[adrhill]

Maybe it's worth it to have a page on deployment, including packagcompiler, compiling apps, and argument parsing.

This makes sense to me, a page for anything related to running Julia outside of the interpreter / REPL session. While we're at it, some pointers on running Julia jobs on common compute cluster environments would be useful as well.

[gdalle]

I have never used any of these tools so I don't feel very comfortable writing such a page but I'll happily review