conan-center-index VS json

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/

I have not done a "desktop" program in 25+ years and never using C++ (or C), since then I'm mostly a web developer (PHP,Elixir, JS, Kotlin etc).

I'm currently doing a C++ audio plugin with the Juce framework.

This website has been a good resource, alongside https://www.learncpp.com

But I was actually close to give up before using those two things:

- https://github.com/nlohmann/json : my plugin use a json api backend and the Juce json implementation is atrocious (apparently because of being born in previous c++ version), but this library is GREAT.

- ChatGPT 4. I'm not sure I would have "succeeded" without it, at least not in a reasonable time frame. ChatGPT 3.5 is slow and does not give good results for my use case but 4 is impressive. And I use in a very dumb way, just posing question in the web UI. I probably could have it directly in MSVC?

Also I must say, for all its flaws, I have a renewed appreciation for doing UI on the web ;)

https://github.com/nlohmann/json works well for me

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.15) project(xrpc++ DESCRIPTION "C++ AT Protocol XRPC library" VERSION 1.0.0 LANGUAGES CXX) include(FetchContent) FetchContent_Declare(cpr GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/libcpr/cpr.git GIT_TAG 2553fc41450301cd09a9271c8d2c3e0cf3546b73) # The commit hash for 1.10.x. Replace with the latest from: https://github.com/libcpr/cpr/releases FetchContent_MakeAvailable(cpr) FetchContent_Declare(json URL https://github.com/nlohmann/json/releases/download/v3.11.2/json.tar.xz) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(json) add_library(${PROJECT_NAME} SHARED src/lexicon.cpp src/xrpc.cpp ) target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} PRIVATE cpr::cpr) target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} PRIVATE nlohmann_json::nlohmann_json) set_target_properties(${PROJECT_NAME} PROPERTIES VERSION ${PROJECT_VERSION}) set_target_properties(${PROJECT_NAME} PROPERTIES SOVERSION 1) target_include_directories(${PROJECT_NAME} PUBLIC include) set(CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE debug)

FetchContent_Declare(json URL https://github.com/nlohmann/json/releases/download/v3.11.2/json.tar.xz) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(json)

Here is one popular C++ library (nlohmann/json) removing its use.

Before going into binary serialization I suggest you to get comfortable with serialization to text. You can try to write your data to text files and read them in again. Then after you get an idea of how this works you can try to use a library that writes to XML or json, e.g. nlohmann json

Download the single header file json.hpp from https://github.com/nlohmann/json/releases and place it in your project directory or an include directory.

Exemple of a JSON library: https://github.com/nlohmann/json (For XML, there's tinyxml)