[bogwog]

Conan + (any build system) = problem solved

Conan has a learning curve, but it’s totally worth it. Anyone making their own build system should get some experience with a state of the art package manager before writing a single line of code, because chances are that it already solves whatever problem is motivating you.

[annowiki]

I started as a python programmer and was very used to package managers. I believed in them, I championed them. When I switched to C++ for work I was very disheartened that there wasn't a standard.

Conan obviously has promise, I haven't spent much time with it, most of my experience with C++ package managers is with nuget and vcpkg. However, my attitude toward package managers is changing.

I increasingly like _not_ using package managers because it makes me (and my company) way way way less likely to bloat our software with unnecessary third party dependencies.

I wrote this in another thread: I never believed you should write something yourself if you can find a package for it. My boss told me I should write it all myself, I could probably write it to be faster. I encountered a case where I needed to compare version numbers in python. For the heck of it I wrote the simplest, quickest, most naive solution I could come up with and then timed it against the most recommended version comparison package in python. I blew it away by 20x throughput.

I don't believe in package managers anymore. Obviously I'll keep using pip and sqlalchemy in Python, but I'll happily spend the 20-30 minutes it takes adding something like nlohmann-json or md4c to my project over worrying about maintaining a package manager for c++ these days. Precisely because it makes me think twice about adding another dependency.

[planede]

Sometimes you have dependencies with actual value add that you really don't want to replicate. No, I'm totally not writing a yaml parser, thank you very much. I can probably write a good yaml parser, possibly even better than some 3rd party stuff, but yaml parsing is simply not our business.

And yaml parsing is probably on the simpler side of things. We need to run torch models, we do need libtorch. We are not rewriting libtorch, that would be silly.

[patrick451]

Yeah, this is something that bugs me about the rust ecosystem. Just to use a random number generator you need to pull in like 15 dependencies. In just a simple learning project that would have had about 1 dependency in c++, I ended up with like 75 for rust. I guess I'm old, but that seems like madness. Cargo being easy and simple is not all upside.

[steveklabnik]

If you just want random numbers, the getrandom crate has only three direct dependencies, one of which is the libc library bindings. I’d you don’t need everything that’s in rand, you don’t have to use rand.

[klik99]

Yes, this. I've been reading many comments here about problems with different dependencies and their own unique build system and kept thinking "Conan would fix that". I'm surprised that it's still so unknown in the C++ world.

[pjmlp]

I prefer the equation, :)

vcpkg/NuGET + (any build system) = problem solved

[klik99]

Does this work across linux, mac and windows cross platform projects?

[dagw]

vcpkg the tool is cross platform. Of course not all libraries in vcpkg are cross platform, but most are.

[pjmlp]

Likewise for NuGET in the context of .NET libraries with native dependencies.