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Don't Overlook Efficient C/C++ Cmd Line Processing

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the also-don't-eat-yellow-snow dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Command-line processing is historically one of the most ignored areas in software development. Just about any relatively complicated software has dozens of available command-line options. The GNU tool gperf is a "perfect" hash function that, for a given set of user-provided strings, generates C/C++ code for a hash table, a hash function, and a lookup function. This article provides a reference for a good discussion on how to use gperf for effective command-line processing in your C/C++ code."

3 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. Speed in options parsing? by tot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I would not consider speed of command line option processing to be bottleneck in any application, the overhead of starting of the program is far greater.

  2. And the standard says... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Good grief. What a strawman of an example.
    Anyone writing or maintaining command line programs knows that they
    should be using the API getopt() or getopt_long().
    There are standards on how command line options and arguments are to be
    processed. They should be followed for portability and code maintenance.

  3. All the world is not a PC by tepples · · Score: 5, Insightful

    HOLY SHIT! 194KB BIGGER?! HOW WILL YOU EVER FIND THE SPACE FOR SUCH A HUGE EXECUTABLE?!?! I develop for a battery-powered computer with 384 KiB of RAM. In such an environment, what you appear to sarcastically call a "mere couple hundred kilobytes" is a bigger deal than it is on a personal computer manufactured in 2007.