clap is a fantastic Rust library for Command Line Argument Parsing. It's both easy to use and powerful - in the spirit of Rust philosophy - you get what you pay for. Simple CLI options are simple to define, while complex schemes (think git level of complex) are absolutely doable.

clap is also one of the best examples of what I would call developer marketing in the Rust community. It has a beautiful and informative homepage, an extensive README (including changelog - see note below), a bunch of good examples, even video tutorials! Hats off to Kevin and all clap contributors, you're doing a great job!

Note: Rust crate authors, please, please add changelogs/release notes to your libraries. Coming from Python where it's customary, it struck me that a lot of libraries do not document their changes aside from the commit log. (Oops, I'm guilty of this myself...)

Welcome to the second edition of 24 Days of Rust!

Two years ago in December 2014 the first edition was pretty well received by the Rust community. That was a hard time - we were still before the 1.0 release of the language. I had to keep up with updating my examples day by day since almost every nightly broke something. Even so, I managed to publish all 24 blogposts on schedule :-)

This year I'm back with another series of articles about Rust tools and libraries. The languge is at version 1.13 as I'm writing this introduction. It's definitely more stable and mature at this point than it was in those savage pre-1.0 times. Some of my examples will probably still require a nightly release, but I'll try to keep them updated when relevant features get into stable.

With that, let's dive in into our first topic, which is....