random thought: what about a Kotlinx Serialization format that encoded to/from command line argument...

# serialization

[Adam S]

random thought: what about a Kotlinx Serialization format that encoded to/from command line arguments?

So you could map between command line arguments and data classes

--log-level INFO --repeat 3 --dry-run

@Serializable
data class Args(
  @SerialName("log-level")
  val logLevel : LogLevel,

  val repeat: UInt = 1,

  @SerialName("dry-run")
  val dryRun: Boolean,
)

It would be kind of like the type-safe routing in Ktor, or instead of parseSpaceSeparatedArgs() and a more hackable version of kotlinx-cli.

The usage mostly being to parse fun main(args: Array<String>) {}, but it could also be used to wrap existing CLI tools, so they can be called from Kotlin (and Gradle), type-safely.

[Oliver.O]

I've been using https://ajalt.github.io/clikt/ for command line parsing and https://ajalt.github.io/mordant/ for text styling and progress bars. Found both of them super useful.

[CLOVIS]

If you like Compose, Mosaic (https://github.com/JakeWharton/mosaic) is also pretty good