[beached_whale]

I think it depends on where you sit on the stack. A library can take a lot of the complexity away from the higher levels in C++ code. The user code can look fluent and understandable. On the implementation side of the library being used(depending on where it sits in abstraction) is where some ugly complexity shows. But this also generally reflects the competence of the authors.

[humanrebar]

On the other hand, it's hard to grab a half dozen C++ libraries off the shelf and just use them together without issues.

[beached_whale]

True. That is getting better though and lots of people are putting time into solving that. It's tricky because no one is talking about the same thing either. Like my project structure isn't your's.

It's not byte code so distributing binaries is a crappy problem too. I am of the mind that a dependency system above the build system(s) is probably the best bet. Not as low level as binary interface, but I need libary X >= version n.m.o...