No. Modules are a failed idea. Really really hard for me to see them becoming mainstream at this point.
IMO, the modules standard should have aimed to only support headers with no inline code (including no templates). That would be a severe limitation, but at least maybe it might have solved the problem posed by protobuf soup (AFAIK the original motivation for modules) and had a chance of being a real thing.
yes you have CPM, vcpkg and conan, but those are not really standard and there is friction involved in getting it work.
Once big companies like Google started pulling out of the committee, they lost their connection to reality and now they're standardizing things that either can't be implemented or no one wants as specced.
Neither of those things require modules as currently defined.
Only the idea is crazy. What Conan does is much more sensible: give s layer independent of the build system (and a way to consume packages and if you want some predefined "profiles" such as debug, etc), leave it half-open for extensions and let existing tools talk with that communication protocol.
That is much more realistic and you have way more chances of having a full ecosystem to consume.
Also, noone needs to port full build system or move from oerfectly working build systems.
> That is not even half realistic.
uv is an existence proof that when you make something that doesn’t suck ass the entire industry will very very rapidly converge.
Claude makes converting any particular configuration from one system to another very very very tractable.
Ah, and the two compiler major frameworks that all those C++ wannabe replacements use as their backend.
Personally I use them in new projects using XMake and it just works.
There's not a compatible format between different compilers, or even different versions of the same compiler, or even the same versions of the same compiler with different flags.
This seems immediately to create too many permutations of builds for them to be distributable artifacts as we'd use them in other languages. More like a glorified object file cache. So what problem does it even solve?
Modules solve the problems of text substitution (headers) as interface description. It's why we call the importable module units "interface units". The goals were to fix all the problems with headers (macro leakage, uncontrolled export semantics, Static Initialization Order Fiasco, etc) and improve build performance.
They succeeded at this rather wonderfully as a design. Implementation proved more difficult but we're almost there.
They have effectively zero use outside of hobby projects. I don’t know that any open source C++ library I have ever interacted with even pretends that modules exist.