conan-center-index VS glbinding

Conan is a package manager for C/C++. See: https://conan.io/.

The way it works is that you can provide "recipes", which are Python scripts, that automate the process of collecting source code (usually from a remote Git repository, or a remote source tarball), patching it, making its dependencies and transitive dependencies available, building for specific platform and architecture (via any number of build systems), then packaging up and serving binaries. There's a lot of complexity involved.

Here are the two recipes I mentioned:

libcurl: https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/master/r...

OpenSSL v3: https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/master/r...

Now, for the sake of this thread I want to highlight three things here:

- Conan recipes are usually made by people unaffiliated with the libraries they're packaging;

- The recipes are fully Turing-complete, do a lot of work, have their own bugs - therefore they should really be treated as software comonents themselves, for the purpose of OSS clearing/supply chain verification, except as far as I know, nobody does it;

- The recipes can, and do, patch source code and build scripts. There's supporting infrastruture for this built into Conan, and of course one can also do it by brute-force search and replace. See e.g. ZLib recipe that does it both at the same time:

https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/7b0ac710... -- `_patch_sources` does both direct search-and-replace in source files, and applies the patches from https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/tree/master/r....

Now, good luck keeping track of what's going on there.

Just checkout ConanCenter https://conan.io/center it's free.

https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index there's 200+ PR that need reviewing :) we add community reviewers fairly often

As for ffmpeg it was last updated 10 days ago https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/commits/master/recipes/ffmpeg/all :)

This is a more complicated recipe https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/master/recipes/pcapplusplus/all/conanfile.py

You can use the Conan package manager with prebuilt binaries/libraries

https://conan.io/center

It's available in Conan too https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/tree/master/recipes/crowcpp-crow though it's not well maintained so no promises if it's working

You need something like https://conan.io/center/ to install the dependencies. You're lucky because it works well with CMake.

This post on github contains a list of packages supported by conan 2.0, its also kept up to date https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/discussions/16196

Use a package manager: https://vcpkg.link/ https://conan.io/center/

Ever heard of https://glbinding.org ?

You should checkout glbinding, it might give you some ideas for your own wrapper.

I have based my career on top of C++/backend/soft-real time systems.

I still have to read the full paper, thanks for the post!

Many people rant about C++, but, IMHO, overall, taking into account ecosystem, tools, etc. C++ stands as an almost unbeatable technology when you put everything together. It has quirks, asymmetries and all of that.

But since C++11 it is nicer to use and all the standards after it have been improving on it: generic lambdas, structured bindings, string non-template parameters, constexpr and consteval... it is amazing what you can do with C++ that is difficult or almost impossible to do with other languages.

On the missing pieces I would mention that you need to use macros to have some kind of reflection for members and pattern matching and networking would be really nice to have.

Modules are still an experiment implementation-wise, but hey, they will improve on the side of hiding implementation details by a big margin.

As for the ecosystem, nowadays you have CMake (whose language sucks badly) and Meson. Together with Conan things have improved a lot since I started coding in around 2001.

Pack that with an IDE like CLion or Visual Studio + Resharper or lightweight IDE (Emacs + Lsp and the like) and you have an environment that is very competitive and whose code can be compiled almost anywhere. From ARM to x86, MIPS and even Webassembly.

That is why I think C++ is still the way to go if what you want is performance: you also have interfaces such as OpenCL/GL/Vulkan/SIMD libraries (though not C++ standard) where you can access hardware. Also, vendors and open source have things such as https://github.com/cginternals/glbinding