Boost your command-line applications with potions! by Eric Torreborre

How hard can it be to parse command-line arguments for an application?
My initial, and foolish, answer was “not too hard”. Thanks to this misplaced over-confidence this talk presents potions,
a command-line arguments parsing library written in Unison (https://unison-lang.org).

We will start with a tour of the library features: various type of options, support for environment variables, styled help, and more.
We will then dive into the implementation of the library, where the main workhorse is (drum roll) Unison's effect system called "abilities".

We’ll see what can be checked at compile-time, what can’t, how abilities are layered to provide different DSLs (domain-specific languages),
how they can be used to enclose state for mutually recursive functions, etc…

Finally, I will talk about some of the issues that slowed me down during the development, and why I feel that a full-fledge
Unison IDE will be indispensable for any medium to large scale project.

Eric Torreborre
I am a Rust/Elixir developer working at Ockam where we enable private systems to communicate without exposing their network to the Internet (ask me more if you're interested!). I am also a functional programmer at heart, having professional experience with both Scala and Haskell which I enjoyed very much!

Blog: https://etorreborre.blog
X.com: https://x.com/etorreborre
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/etorreborre....
Unison: https://www.unison-lang.org/
Potions: https://share.unison-lang.org/@etorre...

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=== Merch ===
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00:00 Stream starts
00:18 Boost your command-line applications with potions! by Eric Torreborre
00:50 Options, flags, arguments, oh my!
02:05 Feature set
02:48 Help!
03:53 Show me the money!
04:54 What is Unison?
06:47 Unison syntax primer
07:44 Unison abilities
11:32 Show me the money!
13:12 Anatomy of on option
15:17 Option parsers
19:40 To the best of my abilities
29:58 Programming at scale
38:21 It’s coming!
38:59 Q & A

#funcprogsweden