Choosing an Application Design

Every Erbsland Core executable creates one Application and finishes by calling run(). The useful choice is not whether to use that lifecycle, but where the application’s own behavior should enter it.

Start with the simplest design that describes the real control flow. Moving to another design later does not replace the surrounding option parsing, error boundary, or shared application services.

Comparing the Designs

Design	Work model	Best fit
Function based	One small callback	Short, single-file utilities that need initialization and a process exit code.
Event driven	Main event loop	Servers, monitors, clients, and programs whose work completes through asynchronous callbacks.
Procedural	One synchronous method	Converters, generators, and batch tools with a clear sequence of operations.
Command style	Selected module callback	Tools with actions such as list, add, remove, or export.
Application parts	Dependency-managed event loops	Larger applications composed from independently started services.

Understanding Main Dispatch

After successful command-line parsing, Application::run() calls handleCommandLineOptions(values) before the virtual main() method. The default implementation first calls the main function of the selected option module. If no module owns the command, it calls the function registered through setMainFn(). If neither exists, it starts registered application parts and enters the main event loop.

This order makes the default implementation useful for four of the five designs. An overridden main() expresses a procedural application, but it also replaces that dispatch. Such an override must explicitly call Application::main(), partManager()->start(), or runEventLoop() if it wants any of those default behaviors.

Shared Application Startup and Error Handling

The design only chooses how application work begins. All variants still benefit from consistent conversion of argc and argv, generated help and version output, framework exception reporting, application-wide services, and cleanup at the process boundary.

Help, version, and command-line errors finish before an application main function is called. This keeps business logic focused on validated values and prevents asynchronous work from starting merely to display help.