My only wish was that C had a package manager, and maybe a dynamic analyzer to could catch bugs that a static analyzer would miss.
Also, being able to cross-compile would be cool. But I guess cosmopolitan solves this.
Also, being able to cross-compile would be cool. But I guess cosmopolitan solves this.
Package manager: dynamic libraries! Or if you want to get really advanced, pkg-config and related. (or static libraries even. Common enough in embedded space!)
Dynamic analyzer : valgrind, gdb, Visual Studio, xCode, ...
Cross compiling : more platforms supported by C compilers than by any other build tool. Oh sure, you need to eventually watch byte sizes (as 8 bit bytes are a fairly narrow set of platforms), and know something about the platform's kernel API (if any, lots of embedded platforms are just hardware interactions!).
So I'll assume this is satire.
All I've seen in practice is "vendoring", which amounts to copy the source into your tree with some degree of review or patching, and then go on as before. After being initially indignant that we didn't use libboost from the OS that approach has really grown on me.
Dependency management is a horrendous mess. Moving the logic into package managers hides that mess from the day to day development which is very nice. However, following a debugger into the binaries that came from apt install is not a great time. Patching the source to behave differently while trying to work out what is going wrong is rather harder too.
If you do the vendored thing, you also get the interesting feature where you can checkout the source tree as it was eight months ago to correspond with whatever a customer is asking about and it builds and runs, instead of telling you that the dependencies no longer exist.
I'm now heading further in that direction. All the libraries should be built from source in the same repo, but preferably by tools that are also in that repo. I'm going to end up with a C compiler checked in as well, much like the embedded toolchain people are prone to doing.
We had a build fail for a few days because a git commit with a given hash didn't exist upstream. Solution? Pin to a branch of course! Vendoring as that solution takes a surprisingly deep realignment.
[0] https://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-cc-powerful-drop-in-replace...
Conan, gdb/DDD, Rational Purify etc. exist and can be replaced/improved by better tools.