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Comment by biggestdecision | Hacker News Reader

If you write standard compliant C, don't use platform specific headers, and use some kind of cross-platform build system (I can't recommend CMake enough here), it's easy to use C/C++ across platforms. UI/graphics is harder, but cross-platform solutions do exist here (Qt, GTK, WxWidgets, OpenGL).

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> I can't recommend CMake enough here

I've used CMake for many years. But now that I've discovered Meson, I cry a little every time I have to edit a CMakeLists.txt file.

But meson used pkg-config under the hood, which looks very unusual/like alien creation for Windows Devs.

These days with stuff like MSYS2 readily available, it's not really as alien as one might think.

If your using stuff like MSYS2 does cmake/meson have a big advantage over old make/autoconf? I thought cross platform was the biggest selling point for these tools.

One selling point seems to be speed: https://mesonbuild.com/Performance-comparison.html

For me, sanity is the main selling point. Make has meaningful space/tab distinction - that's quite enough to disqualify it as hopelessly mad in my book. And then autoconf is just baroque.

CMake only helps a little bit (it's still very old and has way too many warts). But Meson is very pleasant to work with.

The biggest issue with CMake is how many libraries seem to have really low quality CMakeLists.txt's.

CMake is very easy to use, if you do things properly with targets. include_directories and link_libraries should never never ever be used, use target_include_directories and target_link_libraries instead. This way there is no need to mess about with shell script style variables for dependencies. But so many resources online explain to people how to do things the wrong way, and so their libs end up being a pain to build or depend on.

IME the documentation is great at a command level but does a poor job of explaining how things fit together at a macro level.

I did a large project conversion last year and was well into it before I started getting a feel for how everything fit together with Public/Private.

> don't use platform specific headers

Which is often unavoidable if you want to do filesystem stuff.

Qt and Gtk (or just glib) can handle file systems identically across platforms.

I prefer using boost, if UI is not required

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