zen VS CPM.cmake

Btw, some US company already use xmake (see https://github.com/EpicGames/zen for example - need to be part of Epic Games org to see it).

Have you taken a look at CPM ? https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake . It makes CMake project management easy - no need for separate package manager tool.

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})