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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."

5 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.

    1. Re:Speed in options parsing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      You're not a real programmer if you won't over optimize unrelevant parts of your code.

  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. Re:C++ I get by V.+Mole · · Score: 5, Funny

    There's this little project of which you may have heard: http://www.kernel.org/

  4. 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.