Am I reading this wrong, or is std.getopt *really* this stupid?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, March 24, 2018 09:59:44 H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> And given the defensiveness surrounding std.getopt, my conclusion can
> only be: dump std.getopt, roll my own.  It's sad, since in general
> Phobos design tends to be superior to its C++ counterparts.  But we then
> have warts like std.getopt that people refuse to acknowledge is a
> problem.  So be it.

I think that there are at least a couple alternatives to std.getopt on
code.dlang.org if you want alternatives. Personally, the only complaints
I've had with std.getopt is that bundling isn't the default and that it's
not always easy to figure out whether an argument has been set or not. But
at least the bundling can be configured, and getopt can probably be improved
to work with Nullable so that it'll be easier to figure out whether an
argument has been set.

As for defensiveness, I'm not quite sure what you're referring to. The main
point was that given how often getopt gets called in a program, improving
its Big-O complexity isn't worth it, but there have been a number of
improvements to getopt over the years, so it's not like we're not allowed to
improve it. It's just that improving its Big-O complexity is kind of
pointless. In any case, as Andrei said, if a new option can be added to fix
your use case, then that shouldn't be a problem, though I have no clue how
much of a pain that will be to implement, particularly since std.getopt
isn't exactly simple.

- Jonathan M Davis