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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

How can you simultaneously call cpp a mature language with mature tooling and acknowledge that there's no working package manager used by any "serious" project?

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Package managers per language are a (relatively) new endeavor. The oldest language I can think of that widely adopted it was Perl. Although, perl was quite ahead of it's time in a lot of ways, and php undid some the work of perl and went back to popularizing include type dependencies instead of formal modules with a package manager.

C++ "gets away" with it because of templates. Many (most?) libraries are mostly templates, or at the very least contain templates. So you're forced into include-style dependencies and it's pretty painless. For a good library, it's often downloading a single file and just #include-ing it.

C++ is getting modules now, and maybe that will spur a new interest in package managers. Or maybe not, it might be too late.

It's a relatively new endeavor, but it's also a requirement in 2025 if you want to be portable. The Linux ecosystem was focusing on installing dependencies system-wide for decades (that's how traditional `./configure.sh` expects things to work), and this approach is just inferior in so many ways.

The shenanigans people get into with CMake, Conan, vcpkg, and so on is a patchwork of nightmares and a huge time sink compared to superior solutions that people have gotten used to in other languages, including Rust.

I don't think it's a requirement and it does actually come with it's own set of foot guns. The problem is that these design decisions impact culture, which is why JS has a culture of importing far too many third-party packages. Which comes with it's own set of risks.

I agree overall that the C or C++ way of doing things is more cumbersome, but I don't think that's enough to write off those languages as a whole.

Certainly not enough to write them off on its own, but it is one of many problems.

Try to use cargo in a polyglot build and you will get into shenanigans as well, and I have already seen enough clever build.rs files.

Anyone that cares about C++ package managers is already happily using vcpkg or conan, it is a solved problem.

C++ is _getting_ modules now? You must be kidding. How can this language, that adds more and more and more features every couple of years _still_ not have one of the most fundamental way to modularize code, splitting it into semantic units? Like ... what?! I did not think C++ would be that bad when it comes to foundational aspects of a programming language. This must be the result of silly obsession with OOP. The typical misuse of "we have classes, we don't need modules!". What other explanation could there possibly be for lacking such basic means of code organization.

Modules were added in C++20, but it's taken them this long to be implemented. Right now, only MSVC has full support according to https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/20

Because cpp is not meant for "rapid prototyping" involving importing half of github with single command. And the reality is that it works.

Works for whom?

C++ build systems are notoriously brittle. When porting a project to a new platform, you're never just porting the code, you are also porting your build system. Every single project is bespoke in some way, sometimes because of taste, but most of the time because of necessity.

It works because people spend a huge amount of time to make it work.

This seems hyperbolic. At work we cross compile the same code for a decent number of different platform - six different OS (Linux Mac windows and some embedded ones) over 20odd cpu architectures.

It’s the same build system for all of them.

Works for numerous projects which "run the world".

Everyone know the system is brittle, but somehow manage to handle it.

> Works for whom?

FAANG, hedge funds/HFT, game studios

For starters it works for Rust, given that its compiler depends on LLVM, and eventually GCC as well.

apt install xxxxx-dev

Do you people really not realize how completely asinine you sound with these lowbrow comments? I'll give you a hint: did you know that C also has no package manager?

Yeah, and it's also much worse for it. There's a reason everyone in C uses their own linked list implementation and it's not because it's a platonic ideal of perfect software.

The question wasn't whether C/C++ are platonic ideals, the question was whether a language can be mature without a package manager.

If we take “mature” to mean “old” then yes - C and C++ are certainly old. If we take “mature” to mean “good”, then my answer changes.

Agreed. Getting started with a C or C++ project is such a pain in the ass that I won't even bother. Then there is the fact that unless you have special requirements that necessitate C/C++, those languages have nothing going for them.

"Mature" means that it has mostly developed to its logical conclusion, and its warts are well-documented and understood, as are workarounds for them. It doesn't say anything about "good", although using mature tooling can be good because (for all the warts) you don't have the rug pulled from underneath you every couple of years, as seen in e.g. JS land.

I think C/C++ are mature in the sense that everyone has gotten tired of trying to fix these issues. But I think we're getting further and further from "well understood" as time goes on. Very few practicing software engineers understand all the nuances of header files, C files, object files, static and dynamic linking, and how different compilers & ABI targets interact with all of that stuff. To say nothing of configure scripts, makefiles, automake & autoconf, pkgconfig, cmake and ninja and all the rest.

Just today, I spent 2 hours trying to get an OS kernel (SeL4) to compile for ARM64. This is an officially supported platform. I ran into a series of problems:

- A recent update to sel4 meant I need to set -DCONFIG_ARM_TLS_REG_TPIDRU for thread-local storage. (Leaving it out is a compiler error). This flag isn't in the configuration script - and it took me awhile to figure out how to set it through cmake + ninja.

- The gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu toolchain was recommended somewhere in the docs. On newer versions of gcc, that pulls in libgcc_eh.a, which tries to use _dl_find_object - which is of course linux only. So the build fails.

- So I swapped to gcc14's aarch64-none-elf cross compiler toolchain, which doesn't assume a dynamic linker is available. gcc-aarch64-none-elf isn't available in apt for some reason, even though the 32 bit counterpart is. From there, I ran into a new compiler error. Turns out the arm gcc toolchains are built against an old version of binutils that didn't have support for SHF_GNU_RETAIN. That is needed for the retain macro to work in C. And retain is used by sel4. This is just a compiler warning, but because sel4 promotes all warnings to errors, the build fails. I could have built my own compiler with a newer binutils. But I ended up just disabling the warning, because you only live once. I briefly tried gcc11 because that's recommended elsewhere in the docs, but gcc11 has the same problem.

All of this headache was from trying to build sel4 - which is all straight C, and one of the highest quality C projects I've ever seen. The codebase is mathematically proven to be correct. But oh my goodness, what a horrendous mess it is trying to work with it. And of course, just to try and get the build process going, I needed to install multiple compilers, ninja, cmake, python and a bunch of random python packages, and google's 'repo' tool to manage dependencies. What is this junk.

Personally I'd prefer to work with clang, but I've had enough pain for one day. And I know swapping compilers will for sure break something else.

If sel4 was written in zig or rust, it would be 10x easier to build and work with. Zig handles cross compilation to any supported platform out of the box. Rust can install toolchains trivially with rustup. Rust also has consistent stability guarantees, ensuring code doesn't "rot" with new compiler versions. And of course, both handle dependencies much, much better. And no need for cmake / ninja / random python scripts to compile. Zig and rust also don't behave differently based on someone else's binutils version. Wtf.

If C is too "mature" to fix these problems, I'm going to switch languages. Sel4 is only 20k lines of code. I wonder if it'd be less work to port it to zig than work with it in C. (I'd consider rust, but rust code can't prevent panics.)

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