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I think JS gets shit on the most because its both the largest, most popular, visible and relatable. Imagine trying this same exercise with a C++ library you fou

I think JS gets shit on the most because its both the largest, most popular, visible and relatable. Imagine trying this same exercise with a C++ library you found >The cmake build is doesn't work without -GNinja (you do have ninja installed, right?) >No actually use Bazel/Buck/Pants/Meson >Oh you installed $DEP, but not the right $DEP with $DEP-X support >pkg-config can't find $DEP-X >Pre-build $DEP-X was built with GCC N, and you have GCC N-1, try building from source >GOTO 1 for DEP-X I'm embellishing here, but I feel like I always do some version of this song and dance when trying to build a C++ project. And then after all that is done you somehow still end up with linker errors in your final project.

Carpetsmoker 6y ago
I think one difference is that this is usually abstracted to quite some degree. Most devs rarely (if ever) have to deal with C/C++ build systems, as package managers and whatnot deal with that. For most people installing some C/C++ library it's just "apt-get install libfoo" (and maybe libfoo-dev), and they never have to deal with ninja/autotools/cmake/etc, whereas for JavaScript you directly have to deal with the tooling by using "npm install libfoo". The same task mentioned in the article would probably be a lot easier: install package, write some code, "c++ -lfoo main.cpp".
- nemothekid 6y ago
  This is fair, but, the original article mentioned installing a random module on github. A C/C++ library large enough to have distro maintainers, is more akin to a large JS library that has UMD scripts hosted by Cloudflare. In that case, a developer could just do '<script src="https://cdnjs.com/lib.js">' https://cdnjs.com/lib.js">' in a html page. I'm not saying JS is perfect, or that other languages don't have these issues. I haven't used Rails in years but I remember spending a day trying to get a gem installed and figuring out why nokogiri wouldn't compile. Almost every language has these problems.
de_watcher 6y ago
Most of the C++ is curated by the package maintainers. That's the key: do not let upstream programmers do it (they adore their unique build systems and other stuff like that). That's how you get quality user experience. It creates balance between developer of the library/tool and the user of the library/tool.
- alleskleber 6y ago
  In my last C++ project (it's been a while) we ended up including many of our dependencies in source as we required different versions, different build options or small modifications compared to the packaged version. Most of the time we would create a minimal CMake file to build the library to our specs or adapt the existing CMake file.

Carpetsmoker 6y ago

I think one difference is that this is usually abstracted to quite some degree. Most devs rarely (if ever) have to deal with C/C++ build systems, as package managers and whatnot deal with that. For most people installing some C/C++ library it's just "apt-get install libfoo" (and maybe libfoo-dev), and they never have to deal with ninja/autotools/cmake/etc, whereas for JavaScript you directly have to deal with the tooling by using "npm install libfoo". The same task mentioned in the article would probably be a lot easier: install package, write some code, "c++ -lfoo main.cpp".

nemothekid 6y ago
This is fair, but, the original article mentioned installing a random module on github. A C/C++ library large enough to have distro maintainers, is more akin to a large JS library that has UMD scripts hosted by Cloudflare. In that case, a developer could just do '<script src="https://cdnjs.com/lib.js">' https://cdnjs.com/lib.js">' in a html page. I'm not saying JS is perfect, or that other languages don't have these issues. I haven't used Rails in years but I remember spending a day trying to get a gem installed and figuring out why nokogiri wouldn't compile. Almost every language has these problems.

de_watcher 6y ago

Most of the C++ is curated by the package maintainers. That's the key: do not let upstream programmers do it (they adore their unique build systems and other stuff like that). That's how you get quality user experience. It creates balance between developer of the library/tool and the user of the library/tool.

alleskleber 6y ago
In my last C++ project (it's been a while) we ended up including many of our dependencies in source as we required different versions, different build options or small modifications compared to the packaged version. Most of the time we would create a minimal CMake file to build the library to our specs or adapt the existing CMake file.