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

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."

Comments

Re:C++ I get

[mce]

You, whenever you compile C++ code, as it is compiled to C before machine code (unless you are using an exotic compiler such as the Compaq AXP C++ compiler for TRU64).

Excuse me???? That was not even true anymore when I started using C++, back in 1992. There are features in the C++ standard that are so extremely difficult to correctly implement in standard compliant C that it's a complete waste of effort trying to pass via C while compiling. Exception handling comes to mind as the prime example. A failed attempt to support exceptions was the reason why Cfront 4.0 was abandoned. Note that 3.0 was released as early as 1991. The last Cfront based compiler I had the horor of using was HP's CC. It was superseeded by the new native aCC by 1994 at the latest.

By the way, I used to write C/C++ compilation/optimisation stuff for a living, so I guess I know something about the topic.... :-)