CPM.cmake VS cmkr

I like to pin GitHub dependencies using a commit hash, instead of a tag. You need a recent CPM.cmake file in your project for CPM to work.

C++20 brings std::format, improving C++ developer experience for formatting strings. If you have to use older standards, though, add fmtlib to your repo. It plays well with CMake and you can use CPM to add fmtlib to your project. The library supports many Rust format macro features, and makes code far cleaner when you need to do string interpolation with variables.

This is true for almost all projects but things are getting better. I use CPM for a couple of years now and get the experience desired

https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake

Yes, i found vcpkg terrible and FetchContent usually works way better. An amazing project is https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake, which automates FetchContent and makes dependencies mostly hassle free.

There's two completely different aspects to your question. 1) How to manage libraries in c++ without dying from cringe? I'd suggest you use cmake as the build system and grab library sources directly from GitHub using this tool: https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake 2) How to get apps that run under WSL to display windows-native windows? I'm not sure, but it's probably this: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

I personally like to use something called CPMCmake for smaller personal projects, just because it has 0 requirements on the person that wants to use your project, they don't have to setup anything on their end, the only requirement is to have Cmake.

I personally would thoroughly recommend CPM. It's a CMake plugin which you install as a script in your CMake project and you can then use its function CPMFindPackage(), which basically wraps find_package() and ExternalProject() to use the former if the package is installed on the machine, or downloads it and builds it in-tree using the latter if not.

At first, I wanted to install it using Vcpkg but I ended up using CPM.cmake instead. Why? Because with Vcpkg on some platform it is messing up the config and choose a version of Python used in Vcpkg instead of the one I wanted to use. It is not that hard to fix, but why bother when I can install the library in one line with CPM.cmake

set(CPM_DOWNLOAD_LOCATION ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/CPM.cmake) file(DOWNLOAD https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake/releases/latest/download/cpm.cmake ${CPM_DOWNLOAD_LOCATION}) include(${CPM_DOWNLOAD_LOCATION})

We're using vcpkg - tried conan previously. I think both are good, but both of them have their own flaws. You can also go with something like https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake if you just want something quick for a small project.

Been using https://cmkr.build/ for a while now, its great and also declarative.

I would like to counter with a project I’ve been working on: https://cmkr.build. Unfortunately writing good CMake is extremely repetitive and there is definitely room for a generator that has sane defaults.

You are trying to use it the wrong way it seems, the point of CMakeLists.txt is that you only maintain that and nothing else. If you have changes in there then it will re-generate the project for you when it starts building. Adding files via IDE is not supported and is not really the point, there used to be a time where I primarily worked with VS solutions but the more I dove into the open source space the more it became clear that its the worst way of doing it. You just have to get used to a different workflow, the benefit is that your project can be in theory now compiled on all sorts of systems and not just with VS. If CMake is too much to handle perhaps give https://cmkr.build/ a try, it hides a lot of the CMake madness behind its toml specification, been using it for a while now, its great.

https://cmkr.build/ its pretty straight forward and been using it for some time now, can only highly recommend it.

Currently working on https://github.com/build-cpp/cmkr

I started working on https://github.com/build-cpp/cmkr to remedy this, but other similar solutions exist.

I invite you to take a look at https://github.com/build-cpp/cmkr, it makes this even easier ^

I’ve been working on cmkr, a modern build system based on CMake and TOML.

Definitely! I would recommend using cmake because it’s easy to generate a compile_commands.json. I’ve been working on https://build-cpp.github.io/cmkr to make the transition as smooth as possible.