Build Tools (C++)

medium.com

6 pointsBrett_S3 comments

I share the authors frustration. After all you'd think a language that has been around for so long would have a good solution here.

Although the authors list is quite comprehensive, there is a (very slow) convergence to a few systems. The professional world seems to settle on CMake. In open source, meson is quite popular.

The C++ world is still way better than the hardware-design-world (FPGA). Tooling there is absolutely arcane, for a world that has existed as long as the C++ one.

I tried out Meson and I like the higher speed aspect of it, but it didn't seem like they learned from CMake.

CMake has this weird way of doing things the most unintuitive way and then not telling you about why. At least in the last 10 years since I've started developing C/C++ I still couldn't get a good mental model of what happens in CMake.

Then I look at the much younger rust community and cargo is a breeze to work with. Can't we learn from these projects?

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