[wizzledonker]

The closest thing we have at the moment is conan[1]. It’s a cross platform package manager that attempts to implement “integrations”, whereby different build systems can consume the packages[2]. This is a big problem with package management in C/C++, there’s no single, standardised build system that most projects use. There isn’t even a standardised compiler! So when hosting your own packages using Conan, often you need to make sure you build your application for three different compilers, for three different platforms. Sometimes (for modern MacOS) also for two different architectures each.

If you control the compiler AND build system you can get away with just one package for most cases. This true for Microsoft’s C/C++ package manager, NuGet[3]

Historically, the convention has been to use the package manager of the underlying system to install packages, as there are so many different build configurations to worry about when packaging the libraries. The other advantage of using the system package manager is that dependencies (shared libraries) that are common can be shared between many applications, saving space.

[1] https://conan.io/

[2] https://docs.conan.io/1/creating_packages/toolchains.html

[3] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/nuget-for-c/

[grumblingdev]

The cpp ecosystem is insane. I don't know how it got so out of hand. At the end of the day you are just a running a bunch of clang/gcc cli commands. It's really, really, really simple. But all these commands are generated, and the user becomes so detached from what they are actually doing, and then they are left with an error about one of these commands not working, and then they need to dive into this huge monstrosity to figure out what is making a command do something.

Declarative build systems obfuscate so much without providing the proper debugging and error-handling capabilities.

Build systems should be imperative and type-checked. A simple script that a user can step through and observe what is happening.

Makefiles suck because they are not type-checked.

The only abstraction you need is some kind of dependency graph. But then it should be completely transparent to the user so they can easily understand it.

[10000truths]

> Build systems should be imperative and type-checked.

Perhaps Meson fits the bill for you?

[richardwhiuk]

vcpkg is also an option