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Comment by pathsjs | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that it does not manage and version dependencies for you. Say I start a new C++ project where I want - say - use ZeroMQ and also Folly to parse JSON. Where do I start? Should I install ZeroMQ and its headers globally? What if the version changes? Will it conflict with other system libraries? Well, better start using Docker. What if the version I need is not in the Ubuntu repositories yet? I need to add to the dockerfile instructions to download and install the dependencies... you see, things get out of hand real fast

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To paraphrase JWZ...

"Some people, when confronted with a dependency problem, think 'I know, I'll use Docker.' Now they have two problems."

Unfortunately there's no single answer. Static libraries vs. dynamic? Global install or packages from a repo? Everything depends on the degree of control you have over the deployment environment.

Yeah, I know, I don't want to use docker. The problem is that C and C++ offer no real option in this camp. I'd be happy with anything that resolves and download dependencies, builds them locally (using CMake?) and adds the correct headers and library dir configurations to my project. But I could not find anything that really works

True, C/C++ have it a bit more complex. But is it really an unsolvable problem? One would think that with the level of investment in C/C++ someone would be able to create something all the hipster languages have done in the last 20 years.

I guess Gentoo's emerge would be the closest thing to a "good" C/C++ package manager we have today, which I find a bit funny :)

C++ standard committee is working on an intermediate step in the right direction: module support.

IMO, since the trend today seems to be building static binaries, I'd like to see an opinionated tool that made that use case stupid simple.

You can do this with http://Conan.io and CMake. It is quite young still, but at this point is fairly feature complete and doesn't have any breaking changes anymore.

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