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Comment by synergy20 | Hacker News Reader

true, c++ renews itself every 3 years which is great, except that its tooling remains the same.

equip c++ with new tooling like what golang and rust have will be a huge boost to this language.

With the exception of CMake evolution (now days a defacto standard), package managers (as Conan or vcpkg) or the support for new C++ standards in major compilers (clang, gcc, Visual) ;)

It's good that the C++ world has effectively standardized on something, but CMake still has a steep learning curve. I hate its structure as a jumbled mess of independent commands.

It needs more guidance for making simple, typical projects easy to set up, at the very least more stuff that works like ExternalProject_Add (a big powerful command with all its options clearly documented on one page).

OTOH learning how to debug cmake will guarantee your employment for life so there's an incentive.

ExternalProject_Add -> vcpkg or Conan. I have more experience with vcpkg and the steps are:

1) declare your dependencies in a vcpkg.json file (similar to npm's package.json). Example:

{ ... "dependencies": [ "openssl" ] }

2) Add it to your CMakeLists.txt file. Example:

    find_package(OpenSSL REQUIRED)
    target_link_libraries(main PRIVATE OpenSSL::SSL OpenSSL::Crypto)

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