cmake-init-fetchcontent VS gui_starter_template

You can see that in action here: https://github.com/friendlyanon/cmake-init-fetchcontent This example has the idiomatic find_package(headeronly REQUIRED) call in the CMakeLists.txt, but when configuring ${sourceDir}/cmake/find is added to CMAKE_MODULE_PATH, so the FetchContent code is run to "find" the dependency. There are comments to further explain this.

Please consider using https://github.com/friendlyanon/cmake-init before this has any significant amount of users. There is an example that shows you how to still rely on FetchContent as an opt-in.

Are they only on git(hub)? You can write a vcpkg overlay port (example) or use FetchContent if the projects are FetchContent ready in a way that doesn't force FetchContent on people trying to build the project (example).

This came up somewhere else, but I created an example repo that idiomatically uses find_package and an opt-in find module to FetchContent a dependency from GitHub: https://github.com/friendlyanon/cmake-init-fetchcontent

Was checking that as well, can't find it indeed. I would recommend looking into the following: https://github.com/cpp-best-practices/gui_starter_template

gui_starter_template. This is a C++ Best Practices GitHub template for getting up and running with C++ quickly.

Next to language versions, spend time setting up your build system (CMake?) with all bells and whistles. You want unit tests, clang-tidy, include-what-you-use, sanitizers, fuzzing, clang-format, package managers. Just take a look at https://github.com/cpp-best-practices/gui_starter_template

https://github.com/cpp-best-practices/gui_starter_template from Jason Turner (aka lefticus) is quite a popular one (2.1k stars in Github)

I actually just tried to play around with what seems to be a "modern c++" boilerplate project.

It uses CMake, conan for packaging, clang-tidy and cpp-check, and has templates for fuzz and unit testing[1].

I found it because qtcreator and kdevelop were weirdly clunky and created partly broken qt projects and I figured I wanted to add a package manager and qt to the mix.

The template looks really fancy, but it's so incredibly slow, to the point of being unusable.

It's a ramble yes. But the point is modern C++ tools seem to have added some niceties to the language, but they also brought more of the main C++ issues, i.e. slow compile times and nasty boilerplate in the build process. Yes, I realize CMake isn't modern and there are a bunch of new build tools.

[1] https://github.com/cpp-best-practices/gui_starter_template

Clang-tidy file of the C++ Project Template

For cmake i find this useful: https://cliutils.gitlab.io/modern-cmake/ https://github.com/cpp-best-practices/gui_starter_template

Jason Turner (known from cppcast) has following project: https://github.com/cpp-best-practices/cpp_starter_project

this is a cpp_question, but anyway, I think this is exactly what you're looking for. Credits go to Jason Turner.