Phew, several folks have replied to me about how it’s not worth the time thinking about these impacts at all, thus creating a paradox whereby more time has been spent thinking about writing about whether to think about it than has been spent in not thinking about it and just accepting that I wrote a reply on HN about how I feel there are more suitable command-line parsers than clap for most Rust projects! :-)

I agree that much of high-level engineering is knowing whether something is worth thinking about; in this case, I did the thinking already, and I am sharing what I know so others can benefit from (or ignore) my thinking and not have to do so much of their own. If my own personal anecdote of significantly reducing compile times (and binary sizes) by taking a few minutes to replace clap is insufficient, and if the aggregate of other problems I identified don’t matter to others, that’s alright. If reading my comment doesn’t make someone go “huh, I didn’t know {argh|gumdrop|pico-args} existed, clap does seem a little excessive now that you mention it, I will try one of these instead on my next project and see how it goes”, then I suppose they were not the target audience.

I don’t really want to keep engaging on this—as almost everyone (including me) seems to agree, command-line parser minutiae just aren’t that important—but I guess I will just conclude by saying that I believe that anchoring effects have led many programmers to consider any dependency smaller than, say, Electron to be not a big deal (and many think Electron’s fine too, obviously), whereas my experience has been that the difference between good and bad products usually hinges on many such ‘insignificant’ choices combining in aggregate.

Assuming whichever command-line parser one uses operates above a certain baseline—and I believe all of the argparse libraries in that benchmark do—it seems particularly silly to make wasteful choices here because this is such a small part of an application. Choosing wastefulness because it’s technically possible, then rationalising the waste by claiming it increases velocity/usability/scalability/whatever without actually verifying that claim because it’s ‘not worth thinking about’, seems more problematic to me than any spectre of premature or ‘unnecessary’ optimisation. I hope to find better ways to communicate this in future.