Bit of a tangent here but what’s a pip/npm/cargo like package manager for C++? For example ‘pip install boost’? I’ve never worked it out for hobby projects and never worked with it commercially
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.
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.
FYI pip is specifically not a package manager, it's a package installer.
Pip does not attempt to resolve dependency conflicts of already installed packages, only the ones it is currently trying to install. Nor does it try to manage the life cycle of installed packages, such as removing transitive dependencies never specified or no longer needed or create consistent environments with a lock file.
As package specifications have become better defined (rather than "whatever setup.py does") and are being better enforced (e.g. Pip will soon reject version numbers that are non-compliant) there are several attempts at writing full-fledged package managers (Rye, Huak, Pixi, etc.) and I'm sure once one of them gains critical mass it will replace Pip quickly.
There isn't any. There are a few partial ones like conan, etc.
And many people in the community are against it, you'll hear stuff ranging from "just use the distro package manager" to "don't use any, make it a single file library".
Just because I’m curious, in what respect is Conan a “partial” package manager? Within the constraints of existing C++ projects and the variance of their build systems, I can’t imagine how to do it differently.
In my experience, most of the value of Conan is with creating packages yourself when needed. You can then self-host a Conan remote and have pre-compiled binaries ready development. Having a conan recipes repository with CI that produces binaries for each required build configuration has become a de-facto standard for projects I have worked on
I’ve heard a lot about Bazel but are there any good beginner tutorials? When I last looked it felt a little Nix-like (high learning curve to get through which I prefer to ignore for my tooling where possible)
