Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by umanwizard 2417 days ago
This is the #1 thing I love about C++ compared with Rust — I don’t want it to be easy to depend on thousands of things. I would rather use a small, curated, relatively standard set of libraries provided by my OS vendor or trusted third parties.

“Modern, dependency-heavy environments” are a symptom of the fact that certain ecosystems make it easy to get addicted to dependencies; I don’t think they’re a goal to strive towards.
2 comments
zbentley 2417 days ago
That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Building a C++ project with even a few critical dependencies (e.g. graphics libraries, font libraries, a client for a database or other complex network protocol) is a massive hassle. Sometimes those are curated well, sometimes they're not--but they remain essential for many projects. By taking a hard line against the hypothetical explosion of low-quality dependencies, you compromise the ability to use even the "small, curated, relatively standard set" of dependencies that are genuinely essential.
link
de_watcher 2417 days ago
It's not about the ease of use (you need just a couple of lines in CMake to trigger the pkg-config scripts that every lib in the distribution has). It's about the people who work hard on maintaining the distributions. That's where the quality comes from.

And not only for the libraries:

http://kmkeen.com/maintainers-matter/

link