Elevating Rust CLIs: Type-Driven Design for Robustness and Maintainability
2025-07-01
This article champions a type-driven approach to building command-line interfaces (CLIs) in Rust using the clap crate. Instead of relying on string parsing, the author advocates for defining the CLI interface using Rust's type system. This offers several key advantages: improved code maintainability and readability, reduced test surface area and better mock support for unit tests, and easier semantic versioning. The article details clap's derive and env features, showcasing how to define command-line arguments and environment variables using types, resulting in more robust and maintainable CLIs.
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