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by Xraider72 75 days ago
No idea if modules themselves are failed or no, but if c++ wants to keep fighting for developer mindshare, it must make something resembling modules work and figure out package management.

yes you have CPM, vcpkg and conan, but those are not really standard and there is friction involved in getting it work.

3 comments

I emphatically agree. C++ needs a standard build system that doesn’t suck ass. Most people would agree it needs a package manager although I think that is actually debatable.

Neither of those things require modules as currently defined.

That is not even half realistic. Are you going to port all that code out there (autotools, cmake, scons,meson, bazel, waf...) to a "true" build system?

Only the idea is crazy. What Conan does is much more sensible: give s layer independent of the build system (and a way to consume packages and if you want some predefined "profiles" such as debug, etc), leave it half-open for extensions and let existing tools talk with that communication protocol.

That is much more realistic and you have way more chances of having a full ecosystem to consume.

Also, noone needs to port full build system or move from oerfectly working build systems.

Are the perfectly working build systems in the room with us now? Cmake and Conan ain’t it.

> That is not even half realistic.

uv is an existence proof that when you make something that doesn’t suck ass the entire industry will very very rapidly converge.

Claude makes converting any particular configuration from one system to another very very very tractable.

Much like contracts--yes, C++ needs something modules-like, but the actual design as standardized is not usable.

Once big companies like Google started pulling out of the committee, they lost their connection to reality and now they're standardizing things that either can't be implemented or no one wants as specced.

Usable enough for Office, and the initial proposal was done by Microsoft.
I know Microsoft invested a lot into modules development and migrated a few small pieces of Office onto modules, but I'm not sure if they are actually using it extensively, and I'm also not sure if they're actually all that beneficial. Every time I hear about modules, it's stories about a year of migration work for a single-digit build-time improvement.
It has the developer mindshare of game engines, games and VFX industry standards, CUDA, SYCL, ROCm, HIP, Khronos APIS, game consoles SDK, HFT, HPC, research labs like CERN, Fermilab,...

Ah, and the two compiler major frameworks that all those C++ wannabe replacements use as their backend.