I have an issue somewhat related to Steven Haryanto's concern about bloated apps. I can live with a command taking a second longer to run when performing work, but I absolutely detest waiting that long for the usage message to be generated. I am constantly running commands without arguments (eg Git) to get an overview of sub-commands and/or their options. A slow Perl command line app (eg dzil) is a pain in comparison. It is sometimes quicker to load the manpage.

But it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. App::Dispatcher is a tool for constructing command line applications written in Perl. It is specifically designed to handle applications with multiple sub-commands and will generate code to display usage text, validate options and arguments, and dispatch commands. Its main strength is that the usage and validation does not load any command classes with their possibly heavy startup dependencies.