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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 man

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.