[hn_acc_2]

The difference will be painfully clear once you try to walk a junior developer through installing and linking new files to a large project in Visual Studio, vs "copy this .h file here and include it".

Whether or not a "good build system" should handle it, the fact that single-file libraries are much preferred these days should demonstrate most people don't have such a build system

[10000truths]

So much of the C/C++ ecosystem revolves around knowing your build tools that, for most intents and purposes, it should honestly be considered an integral part of the languages. If I ever teach an introductory C/C++ course, I would dedicate at least 1/4 of my time to explaining:

* What a translation unit is, and how compiling a translation unit to an object file works

* What a linker is, and how the linker combines object files into a library/executable

* What make/autotools/cmake are, and how they work

* What FHS is, and how it standardizes the lib/bin/include paths that C/C++ build tools read from/install to

And so on. Any C/C++ course that goes beyond a “Hello world” program without explaining these concepts in detail does its students a disservice.

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, in our class we had to figure out this mostly on our own, so after it I'm still at the level where I barely manage to make make work, I'll have to look into those other ones, thanks !