As I think this is a genuine question, I will answer accordingly. My build system of choice is CMake and my package system of choice is vcpkg. I will assume bot

As I think this is a genuine question, I will answer accordingly. My build system of choice is CMake and my package system of choice is vcpkg. I will assume both are already setup. They are easy to setup on all of Windows/macOS/Linux by following the instruction. I tested. First, you need to find out the package name. Run vcpkg search sdl2. It tells you that the package is called sdl2. It is trivial in this case, but if you wanted SDL 1.x, it could have been called sdl, or sdl1. vcpkg search will tell you it's sdl1. Next, you install it by running vcpkg install sdl2. This will build from source. >1000 packages in the official repository should build cleanly, warning free, etc. Installation tells you how you should use the package with CMake. It is two lines. find_package(SDL2), and target_link_libraries(main SDL2::SDL2). To use CMake with vcpkg, copy and paste two lines to your CMakeLists.txt, and run CMake with CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE set to vcpkg.cmake. Yes, C situation is bad, but it is not as bad as people think.