[IshKebab]

Honestly if you lack the vision to see why that sucks I really suggest you try a language with good package management - e.g. Go or Rust. Maybe it will make it easier to see all the problems with the traditional C approach if you can see how it should work.

[icedchai]

C and C++ dependency installation is "sub-optimal" but it is certainly well understood. The fact that there are many cross platform, open source projects written in C and C++ proves this. If you can't deal with makefiles and scripts, maybe stick to Go and Rust?

[inferiorhuman]

  C and C++ dependency installation is "sub-optimal" but it is certainly well
  understood. The fact that there are many cross platform, open source projects
  written in C and C++ proves this.

Nope. It proves that people have found work arounds up to and including cargo culting things. Any large enough project is going to rely on something else to generate the makefiles, and if you depend on anything large enough you're gonna get stuck having to build and/or install whatever other makefile generators are required. Simply put it's an archaic mess.

  If you can't deal with makefiles and scripts, maybe stick to Go and Rust?

To be clear it's not that I can't deal with makefiles it's that I don't find it a good use of my time*. Take, for instance, the FreeBSD ports tree. make(1) is its achilles heal and the main reason it's obscenely slow to deal with (even compared to something like portage). Besides, doing anything by hand is inherently error prone be it bounds checking array access or cobbling together dependency management.

* And, sure, in years past I wrote a drop-in replacement for automake/autoconf in perl whose big (speed) advantage was that it didn't spawn a new shell for each check. It was a neat hack, but that's all anything papering over the make(1) interface is.

[steveklabnik]

> If you can't deal with makefiles and scripts, maybe stick to Go and Rust?

Many people will in fact do just this.