Differences with ledger-cli
Although dinero is completely inspired by ledger-cli and implements a subset of its features, it has been written form scratch, it is not a port.
Some behaviors are intentionally different. Other things are just bugs: if you find one, feel free to add an issue in the development repository.
dinero is developed in Rust, while ledger is developed in C. This is completely transparent to the end user, it does at least theoretically provide some advantages for developers, with Rust being a newer language with the same speed as C but more memory safety. Again, this at least theory
The next table presents a summary of differences, with the most important ones being commented later.
| What | ledger | dinero |
|---|---|---|
| Programming language | C | Rust |
| Feature set | a lot of options for each command | just some options for each command |
| Transaction sorting for balance assertion | within file? | global |
| Speed | extremely fast | not quite as fast (yet) |
| End with newline | files must end with a blank line | no need to do that |
| Regular expressions | assume ignore case | not always (it is well known when) |
| Unicode | not everywhere | € is a valid currency |
Balance assertions
Balance assertions have the same syntax in both languages, but the way they are handled is different.
In ledger it is very difficult (for me) to add balance assertions to all the transactions, in particular when you have several ledger files linked together. The balance assertions are processed more or less as they appear in the files, which depends in the order you read the files with the include directive.
In dinero every transaction is read, then they are sorted by date (without altering the original order in ties) and finally tha balance is checked.
The practical consequence for me (Claudio) in particular is that rather than doing this:
include past/201701.ledger
include past/201702.ledger
; ...
include past/202103.ledger
I can do this instead:
include past/*.ledger
This results in a much shorter file, easier on the eyes (I like my master.ledger file to be complete yet simple). ledger does not guarantee the order in which the files are read and that affects balance assertions. dinero doesn't guarantee it either, but the extra ordering step means it doesn't matter (though arguably it makes it somewhat slower)