Argtable3 differences from argtable2?

[jonathanmarvens]

Hi there.

I’ve been using argtable2 in projects for years now and I’m a pretty big fan of it. Would you mind telling me what the specific differences (functionality, logic, API, usage, etc.) are between argtable2 and Argtable3? It’s not immediately clear, so it’d help a lot to have an objective understanding of why someone would pick one over the other.

Thank you.

- Jonathan

[tomghuang]

Hi Jonathan,

The major differences are:

• The license changed from LGPL to BSD, which is more friendly to closed-source use cases.
• Argtable3 provides amalgamation distribution, which means that you just need to copy a single .c file and a single .h file to your project. No more building library headache. Of course, you still can build the library separately in the traditional way, which is useful when you want to build Argtable3 as a shared library.
• In the latest version, I've added utility functions to implement multi-command CLI.

I've tried my best to keep the API backward compatible. So if you want to move to Argtabe3, it should be very smooth.

Regards, Tom

[jonathanmarvens]

Thank you for the clarification, Tom [@tomghuang]!

- Jonathan