How about making the language more accessible to newcomers by providing a sane default way of doing package management and builds. Go is a great example of both things done reasonably well out of the box.
Trying to program C++ in windows is an horrible experience that I wont wish on my worst enemy.
Linux is nice, but it doesn't have after effects, support for the latest ultrabooks, photoshop ( sorry GIMP is a joke ).
Linux also contantly breaks whenever I tried using it, sound, video ?
Also gaming.
Anyway the browser environment is cool because it forced everyone to stick to a single standard.
( Also corporate uses windows, sadly. Working with tools created by major corporations in my industry is on windows )
I will give vagrant a try though.
Any comment making fun of windows always get upvoted even if its just anecdotal. My experience is also anecdotal and needs to be taken just a data point. Linux users seem to not be able to stomach any constructive criticism.
I tried using linux for a long time - the problem is life got in the way. I need to provide lab reports and do mathematics. Linux is a hassle for any non-programmer. Maybe when I get a decent laptop like DELL XPS that can run linux I will give it another try.
For now though I am having to stick to a single ultrabook for various reason and linux is not friendly to new-comers.
Just my experience.
You'd be surprised. I know labs publishing multiple high impact papers pretty much each year and then some more less high impact papers and they all use Word. Also PowerPoint for posters. Probably not the best tools for the job, but I see that often in research.
As an amateur, I've found kdenlive and audacity provide decent video and audio editing on Linux. Professionals use Mac.
Typically installing Linux from scratch has involved less fiddling with drivers than installing windows from scratch on an empty laptop for a while now.
If you want a laptop with Linux support out of the box, you can pay for that and it will just work (e.g. http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd or http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/laptops.aspx?c=us&cs=04&l=...)
Gaming is a fair point, but even that might be changing with Valves efforts.
I use Windows, Mac and Linux each, they all have their advantages, but for serious software development Linux is ahead of MacOsX and both are way ahead of Windows.
Windows 8 has worked out of the box on every configuration I've tried, with the caveat that it installs non up to date drivers (e.g. High end graphics cards). My experience with Linux (Ubuntu 15.04) is that the little use peripherals I have don't work at all ( I've a Bluetooth usb adapter and a usb capture card that both are plug and play on windows vista onwards but I've yet to find working drivers on Linux for).
Here's the thing - if you can't make linux work for you at this point in time then you really have no business being in technology, at all.
In practice, this hasn't been a problem for my C++ projects for years, except on OS X where there have been too many changes in a couple of years (gcc -> gcc-llvm -> clang, libstdc++ -> libc++).
* It only works in Linux, not Windows or Mac OS X.
* You need additional work to have it work in more distributions
* Linux package file formats are not distribution neutral, there's no "package.json" which is understood by every package manager
I think C++ needs an OS neutral package management system.
I think what people want is something like go, where you add a single line to your code and it magically downloads and compiles the referenced library. C++ doesn't have anything like that (and I doubt it ever will to be honest).
Not like Go. It needs to solve versioning.
* I'm being very generous here.
Each one can work well in isolation; but when you then need to integrate with your platform package manager or another language's package manager, you get a combinatorial explosion of possible interactions.
One example that I've been particularly frustrated by recently is Python/Emacs integration. I have Emacs and Python installed via my system package manager (apt). Then there are a bunch of Emacs modes that I need to install via the Emacs package manager (elpy and its dependencies). Those in turn have dependencies on Python packages (rope/flake8). And finally I have a bunch of different python packages that I work on that are all linked to from a virtualenv so that they'll all resolve properly in all of those tools.
If I upgrade one part of that system (apt, emacs packages, python packages), it frequently breaks other parts, because there aren't any proper dependencies between them. I then have to spend a while fiddling with the whole setup to get it back up and running again.
Basically, the more package managers you have, the less value they have. The whole point of package managers is to manage a whole set of packages together, so you don't have to manually go through and resolve all of the dependencies yourself, manually figure out which version of this package goes with what version of that package. But every time there is some dependency between two different package managers, that breaks down.
Another part of the frustration is that they are all basically doing the same thing, but with slightly different implementations. In the end, a package manager's purpose is to let you figure out which packages you need, by resolving dependencies while honoring version constraints, fetch those packages from an archive somewhere (and verify that they are intact and haven't been tampered with), unpack them and install the files in the right places, and run some glue code to set up indexes, documentation, and so on appropriately. The only part of that task which really needs to differ between package managers is that glue code, plus the policies for inclusion in the centralized archive; everything else is basically solving the same problem in a whole bunch of slightly different ways (different ways of representing and comparing version numbers, different ways of verifying package integrity, different ways of doing local mirrors, etc), and so you get a whole bunch of incompatible and differently buggy implementations of the same kinds of things, or some functionality just missing from certain package managers.
What I would really like to see is a single unified package manager core, that handles all of the basic functionality that they all set out to solve, with the ability to utilize multiple different repositories (so that different projects could have their own policies for inclusion and sets of packages that are designed to work together), and appropriate places to hook in all of the language (or distro) specific glue that you need. I've been mulling over trying to write such a package manager, but of course when doing so you need to be careful or you will run into this problem: https://xkcd.com/927/
You can do additional work to pre-build wheels or packages, but then you're stepping outside of the python and pip world and into maintaining your own repos and build servers and...
npm would be a much better example, however not perfect as well. Actually, I would say all package managers we have are quite imperfect, but it's more of a existing implementations problem, not a package manager problem in general.
I mean, yeah, it would be nice if we all just started using guix or something, and wouldn't need language-specific package managers anymore, but it's not happening yet, right? And we have to live somehow until it does. And if I need to use language-specific package manager to be able to install a library that has a new version with crucial fixes on github since yesterday, and the version apt-get suggests is two years old — well, I'd better be using language-specific package manager. Still better than compiling it manually collecting dependencies all over the world over the next few hours.
In Ruby, for example, Bundler is what I would call a project manager. It installs packages to a place only it knows (or it should know) about, and Bundler or tools that integrate with Bundler wrangle the Gem loader path to control what modules are available to load.
This way the dependencies of any number of project live in complete isolation from one another, including several different versions of the same dependency which is often impossible to achieve using a system package manager like apt or pacman. The end result is similar to something like virtualenv, but with (in my opinion) a friendlier user experience.
These project managers also often include project scaffolding tools and subcommands to run tests, generate documentation, etc. Examples in other languages include Leiningen or Boot for Clojure, Maven for Java, and Cargo[1] for Rust. When used properly and when the creators of a project manager understand its role, they can work in concert with a system-level package manager. Cargo, for example, interoperates beautifully with system packages with great support for linking with system libraries[2].
[1]: http://crates.io/
[2]: http://doc.crates.io/build-script.html#case-study:-linking-t...
Cross-platform C++ package management using CMake only.
Not just languages - WordPress, MediaWiki ...
If you're very lucky it won't clash horribly with apt and yum. So you probably won't be lucky.