A new post of mine has just been published on Mesosphere Blog:

Almost every program needs to parse some form of command-line argument. Often, this is a pretty large set of possible options, and the management of the various options is usually pretty tedious while adding virtually no value to the program’s functionality.

Google’s gflags are thus a very welcome contribution in that they remove the tediousness. They let program developers give their users a fairly complex set of options to choose from, without wasting time re-inventing the wheel.

However, the use of macros and certain other quirks within gflags led the team developing Apache Mesos to create a more object-oriented approach to the same problem. This new approach yields a more familiar pattern to the programmer (and those familiar with Python’s ‘argparse’ library will see several similarities there too).

You can read the rest of the post here.

The code is in this github repo.