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I am not advocating for Rust and don't care at all if these tools are written in Assembly or C++; as long as they exist and work well, I am happy. When I wrote

by magnio 3y ago

I am not advocating for Rust and don't care at all if these tools are written in Assembly or C++; as long as they exist and work well, I am happy. When I wrote that statement, I didn't really mean C++ the language, but C++ the developer experience. I have tried to write a few command-line utilities in C++, and while the language proper is quite capable, dealing with CMake, package management, header files, and testing is just more headache-inducing than in Rust for me. Most of it probably stems from my lack of experience with C++, but it doesn't change the fact that despite C++ being 20 years older than Rust and having an order of magnitude more users, most of new JS toolings are not written in it. Feel free to prove me wrong by pointing me to good tooling projects in C++. I actually want to learn more C++ best practices for working with another language.

FpUser 3y ago
I mainly use CLion by JetBrains for development. It does use CMake. I can't point you for particular tooling C++ project. The only 3rd party source code I use are some C++ libraries. All it takes in my particular case is adding couple of lines in CMakeLists.txt file and I am very far from being CMake expert.
- wredue 3y ago
  CMake is actually a perfect demonstration of how annoying C++ development tooling can be. The documentation is massively verbose but doesn’t really say anything helpful. There’s basically no “Modern CMake” examples that anyone can agree upon. (I do see that there’s some GitHub repos these days that maybe do show some of it). There’s very little information on “The CMake way of doing things”. You really need to learn by examination, and your assumptions in the end will very likely be wrong. Even just adding a package fetch in CMake is infuriating. What is the currently accepted way to do this? (I admit that I haven’t used CMake in a while, but as of a year ago, the internet and CMake docs did not agree on the correct way, even internally)
  - FpUser 3y ago
    We must be living in a different world. It literally takes me seconds to create new executable project. >"Even just adding a package fetch in CMake is infuriating." I am not sure how to do it because I do not let build process / environment fetch things from the Internet. I always download / deploy / update manually upon real need. I would agree that having IDE do it for you is convenient but since I only use very few libs there is no need for me to do it at all. If I need to create new project I just copy a template, fire up CLion IDE and it all takes few seconds from the - I am going to do it, to start actual coding.
    - maleldil 3y ago
      Using external libraries is important because it lets you focus on what's important for your project. C++'s lack of a proper package manager means we're all reinventing the wheel because adding dependencies is non-trivial. Cargo/Rust and Go show how compiled languages can have drastically superior development experiences. CMake is primitive in comparison. Its only upside is its flexibility, which I reckon isn't worth it for most cases.
      - zigzag312 3y ago
        A while back I needed to write a small library in C++. It took me about the same amount of time to write few dozen lines of CMake (to get build working with all the external libraries), as it took me to write few thousands lines of C++. I wasted way too much time dealing with CMake.
        FpUser 3y ago
        >"few dozen lines of CMake (to get build working with all the external libraries), as it took me to write few thousands lines of C++." I claim BS unless those "thousands lines" were cut'n paste.
        zigzag312 3y ago
        No, but it was a rewrite of C# code. Using MSVC compiler, targeting Windows and Linux. C++20 with modules. External libraries: libsodium, lmdb, roaring & rocksdb. First time using CMake.

by magnio 3y ago

FpUser 3y ago

I mainly use CLion by JetBrains for development. It does use CMake. I can't point you for particular tooling C++ project. The only 3rd party source code I use are some C++ libraries. All it takes in my particular case is adding couple of lines in CMakeLists.txt file and I am very far from being CMake expert.

wredue 3y ago
CMake is actually a perfect demonstration of how annoying C++ development tooling can be. The documentation is massively verbose but doesn’t really say anything helpful. There’s basically no “Modern CMake” examples that anyone can agree upon. (I do see that there’s some GitHub repos these days that maybe do show some of it). There’s very little information on “The CMake way of doing things”. You really need to learn by examination, and your assumptions in the end will very likely be wrong. Even just adding a package fetch in CMake is infuriating. What is the currently accepted way to do this? (I admit that I haven’t used CMake in a while, but as of a year ago, the internet and CMake docs did not agree on the correct way, even internally)
- FpUser 3y ago
  We must be living in a different world. It literally takes me seconds to create new executable project. >"Even just adding a package fetch in CMake is infuriating." I am not sure how to do it because I do not let build process / environment fetch things from the Internet. I always download / deploy / update manually upon real need. I would agree that having IDE do it for you is convenient but since I only use very few libs there is no need for me to do it at all. If I need to create new project I just copy a template, fire up CLion IDE and it all takes few seconds from the - I am going to do it, to start actual coding.
  - maleldil 3y ago
    Using external libraries is important because it lets you focus on what's important for your project. C++'s lack of a proper package manager means we're all reinventing the wheel because adding dependencies is non-trivial. Cargo/Rust and Go show how compiled languages can have drastically superior development experiences. CMake is primitive in comparison. Its only upside is its flexibility, which I reckon isn't worth it for most cases.
    - zigzag312 3y ago
      A while back I needed to write a small library in C++. It took me about the same amount of time to write few dozen lines of CMake (to get build working with all the external libraries), as it took me to write few thousands lines of C++. I wasted way too much time dealing with CMake.
      - FpUser 3y ago
        >"few dozen lines of CMake (to get build working with all the external libraries), as it took me to write few thousands lines of C++." I claim BS unless those "thousands lines" were cut'n paste.
        zigzag312 3y ago
        No, but it was a rewrite of C# code. Using MSVC compiler, targeting Windows and Linux. C++20 with modules. External libraries: libsodium, lmdb, roaring & rocksdb. First time using CMake.