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Comment by linkdd | Hacker News Reader

CMake, SCons, Autotools, Meson, Premake, to quote only them.

They are build systems alright, but they miss the most crucial point: dependency managment.

On the other side we have:

  - cargo for Rust
  - buck and buckaroo for C++ which seems nowhere near complete

Am I missing something?

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This is exactly my painpoint with C++ too. With Rust and such I'm one simple command line call away from installing a dependency. With C++ every dependency is a battle.

There is conan or vcpkg. I do wish crates.io and julia would make it easier to develop on non internet machines. The ease of dependency management has bred staggeringly deep dependency trees for rust and julia. If I could run a cargo command to get a human readable dependency list that I could then go to an internet facing machine and run a cargo command to put into a tgz to drag back over that would be helpful. Is there any progress on making a crates mirror for offline networks?

A list of dependencies:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/commands/cargo-tree.html

Download all dependencies locally:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/commands/cargo-vendor.html

I think maybe I don't understand vendor. I thought you had to have your project on the internet facing machine to vendor its dependencies. Which I cannot do.

Likewise, I don’t understand the disconnect. You have to have your list of dependencies on an internet connected machine, yes, but you already allowed that. You said:

> I could then go to an internet facing machine and run a cargo command

Copy over your Cargo.toml to that machine, run vendor, copy the vendor files back.

<sheepish headslap> thanks!

Yes, Conan and vcpkg have gotten better lately, but that is a relatively recent development. Just two years ago I still had a hard time finding some common libraries with Conan. It's good that the situation is better now.

vcpkg install.

It integrates with cmake too!

Then again, for every project you have to then setup vcpkg and cmake. I thoroughly enjoy that Rust comes with a build system, package manager and test framework out-of-the-box. But it is good that the situation with C++ is getting better.

Yep no arguments there. It's not perfect, but it's nowhere near as bad as the article makes it out to be. Also, you only set up a project once, but it's compiled and iterated on many many more times. Having some initial friction isn't ideal but it's better to solve for the real problems which are maintaining a project.

meson has subprojects. Try building gtk4. If you don't have some deps on the system, meson will download and build them as necessary.

Cmake is pretty good, but you're right it's no dependency manager. And dependency management us definitely tough in c++. There's vcpkg and conan though which are huge improvements over the status quo.

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