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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

In what concerns Windows, cmake + vcpkg is getting pretty sweet, now even binary dependencies are finally properly available, catching up with conan.

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Now I just finished three days of work to remove vcpkg.

Windows + vcpkg + MSVC it works perfectly. Windows + vcpkg + clang it is a knightmare of linking problems.

clang is supposed to have a compatible ABI with MSVC as long as you use link.exe for linking. Is this not the case?

http://blog.llvm.org/2018/03/clang-is-now-used-to-build-chro...

clang, and most likely not the version packaged by Microsoft on Visual Studio, that is the problem right there.

I didn't encounter any problems with vanilla clang on Windows for building projects (installed with "scoop install llvm"), in fact I was surprised that it worked out of the box, even for code that extensively uses Windows APIs). I suspect that it requires a MSVC toolchain installation, or at least the Windows SDK installed, but since everything "just worked" I didn't dive too deeply into what's actually happening under the hood.

Right, I found a tutorial of someone explaining how to use vcpkg with VSCode+CMake [1] (without the VS2019 IDE) and he mentions the process required a lot of trial and error.

VS2019 otoh, in my experience, just worked out of the box (with the single package I tried ...).

1: https://gamefromscratch.com/vcpkg-cpp-easy-mode-step-by-step...

I tried vcpkg recently and I was pleasantly surprised!

The Win installation [1] (assuming VS is already present) was pretty easy. I tested by running `vcpkg install glfw3` and copy-pasted an example from the web into VS2019. The example ran with _zero_ configuration!

Is the experience as nice in Linux or Mac?

1: https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg#quick-start-windows

Yes, the experience is just as nice on Linux, assuming you're using CMake to generate your Makefile. When you run the cmake generate command, you just need to add one option to specify the location of your vcpkg directory. Of course the same applies on Windows if you're using CMake to generate your Visual Studio project, except that you'll probably want to specify the triplet on the command line too (the default one is 32-bit).

Footnote: If you're doing this on Windows and want static linking then the experience is less smooth. You still need to specify the vcpkg directory and triplet (x64-windows-static), but that doesn't automatically change your application's CRT to the static one (which all your libraries are now assuming). There are a couple of ways round this but the easiest is probably to use MSVC_RUNTIME_LIBRARY CMake property (requires at least CMake 3.15, which is pretty new).

[1] https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v3.15/prop_tgt/MSVC_RUNTIME_LIB...

I focus mostly on Windows, but given that even Google is integrating Android's NDK with vcpkg, I guess it works quite alright.

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