cereal VS CPM.cmake

I'd stick with cereal for serialization

Today I'm back to working on Pataro, the roguelike built on libtcod that made up much of my Hacktoberfest efforts. I had been assigned to an issue requesting the addition of serialization and deserialization, but unfortunately ran out of time and wasn't able to finish the former or start the latter. I ran into issues with Cereal, and had a hard time figuring out the structure of the program and how to go about implementing serialization for all the relevant components. At the end of that attempt I mentioned that if I were to try again I'd start by testing out Cereal separately and getting a handle on that before trying to implement it in Pataro - so that's what I'm doing today.

I am once again working on Pataro today, and I've succeeded in clearing up some issues and creating new ones. I've been stuck on an issue where Visual Studio was raising errors in the portion of the code where I call the cereal archive on some types, but was able to clear up that issue by moving the save function definitions out of their respective headers and into the corresponding .cpp files. Examining this repo and its use of cereal again, I was able to get a bit clearer of an idea of how it's implemented, and I included just about every relevant cereal header I could find to try and avoid any issues like the previous one popping up again (with the intention of later removing whichever I can to avoid redundant inclusions).

On the Pataro front, I've started looking at other examples of people using cereal for their games. It seems to be a popular choice for roguelike games like this, so hopefully I can figure out both the syntax problems I'm facing, as well as logical ones like how the program should be structured to have all the necessary data properly serialized and deserialized.

Progress on one front but roadblocks on another. After my post yesterday outlining my plans to add serialization to Pataro I ran into some issues with calling the archive class in cereal wherein the call wouldn't go through due to an incorrect number of arguments. This happened with both vector and size_t data members, and I'm still investigating why.

This is the simplest serialization library I saw. You only need to add one method to your class and you can stream it to desired archive. It supports binary as well as json, XML and others. https://github.com/USCiLab/cereal

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.