conan VS wxWidgets

Silly question: What's the difference between C++20 modules and https://conan.io? (Google was vague, and ChatGPT, you know, sometimes makes things up so I rather ask fellow humans...)

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.

There were various approaches recommended depending on our language and ecosystem. My classmates who developed using Node.js were recommended npm, and PyPI or poetry for Python. Since my program is written in C++, I was recommended to look into one of vcpkg or conan, but I ultimately did not use either package manager.

Hi u/instinkt900, Conan maintainer here. Thanks for your feedback! Please remember that we actively monitor and respond to our issue tracker on GitHub (https://github.com/conan-io/conan/issues/new/choose), we’d love to hear about your specific use cases or pain points, so that we can improve your experience and that of other users. The motivation behind most of the updates in Conan 2.0 was precisely feedback from the community, and to improve our ability to continue delivering features in the constantly changing C++ ecosystem. We can certainly do this at a quicker pace, with some exciting new features recently released and in the pipeline: package metadata, transparent backup of downloaded package sources, cache least-recently-used cleanup, etc. A lot of the big decisions that we took for Conan 2.0 were taken with consensus from expert users and contributors (https://conan.io/tribe) and https://github.com/conan-io/tribe. Some specific workflows may not have 1:1 replacements in Conan 2.0, and are likely to affect some of the “less travelled roads” of Conan 1.x, including some features that were always marked as experimental. We are happy to hear feedback so that we can best satisfy these use cases. Conan 2.0 also includes a more sophisticated API to cover cases where the built-in integrations may not satisfy users needs. For what it’s worth - we have also heard very positive feedback from users about how Conan 2.0 simplifies their workflows when compared to Conan 1.x. The C++ tooling ecosystem is fragmented and moves at different speeds, including our users. So it’s always a fine balancing act, but we don’t want to leave anyone behind! An example is Conan Center - over 90% (~1200) of all recipes have been migrated to support Conan 2.0, while still maintaining compatibility with Conan 1.x, precisely to avoid breaking users that are still on Conan 1.x.

Solution: don't use git submodules - use a package manager like Conan or vcpkg.

The closest thing we have at the moment is conan[1]. It’s a cross platform package manager that attempts to implement “toolchains”, whereby different build systems can be integrated[2]. This is a big problem with package management in C/C++, there’s no single, standardised build system that most projects use. There isn’t even a standardised compiler! So when hosting your own packages using Conan, often you need to make sure you build your application for three different compilers, for three different platforms. Sometimes (for modern MacOS) also for two different architectures each.

If you control the compiler AND build system you can get away with just one package for most cases. This true for Microsoft’s C/C++ package manager, NuGet[3]

Historically, the convention has been to use the package manager of the underlying system to install packages, as there are so many different build configurations to worry about when packaging the libraries. The other advantage of using the system package manager is that dependencies (shared libraries) that are common can be shared between many applications, saving space.

[1] https://conan.io/

Anyway, the problems are today starting to get fewer, as more an more adopt standard cross-platform portable build systems, a.k.a. CMake and package managers such as vcpkg or Conan. Together this will take care of building, installing, linking and using the entire dependency tree.

Simply use a package manager: Crypto++ is available on both vcpkg and Conan.

If you want a specific version or provide a more integrated workflow that is easier to use across platforms and among many developers, use a package manager like vcpkg or Conan.

I do however always recommend using a package manager: vcpkg or Conan to install and integrate third party libraries (together with CMake). This normally solves all the typical problems with dependencies.

The Elixir programming language is no stranger to desktop applications as the language actually supports building them out of the box. It uses wxWidgets: a C++ library that lets developers create applications for Windows, macOS, Linux and other platforms with a single code base. But wxWidgets has a very complex API, and doesn’t solve issues that usually come with desktop applications around packaging.

Qt is also 100% open/free. In fact, both are available under the LGPL, just that wxWidgets also grants an exception to not have to distribute application sources even when statically linked:

https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets#licence

But for big programs, ones written in C++? Good luck it won’t be easy at all. You might try wxwidgets or qt. I do not predict trying to click box-ify complex cli tools yielding much success.

In theory, you should be able to use FFI to interface with something like wxWindows, but you might again have problems on macOS, I don't know. And to me eyes, Wx looks a bit outdated.

This seems to be like the classic wxWidgets [1], i.e. it's an API that wraps the underlying platform's default toolkit. So on Windows it uses Windows' native controls, in Linux it seems to use GTK, and so on.

That means that the advantage is being able to write against one API, and get cross-platform compatibility, which can be nice. It also means (typically) being limited in what you can do to the least common denominator, or you (=the toolkit author) end up having to re-implement features from one platform that you want to expose but that are missing on some supported target(s). Or, of course, have an API with non-portable parts in it.

In any case, it means the "look and feel" is not the core feature of the API since that is going to be "like the target platform" and that is the point.

Given the origin, I guess Lua support is important too, here.

[1]: https://www.wxwidgets.org/

- So, I found wxWidgets. Which looked good. However, when I followed some tutorials I was getting errors. Even when I copied and pasted the tutorial code. Furthermore, the library still doesn't seem to simplify the process much.

It is the icon for WXWidgets, a programming toolkit for making user interfaces that work on Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

In general, people will use a cross-platform library to port such applications. While QT will likely never really stabilize (I'd flag it unsustainable), the https://www.wxwidgets.org/ is able to be statically linked into commercial and opensource projects at no cost without tripping GPL.

"Hiring a senior C++ developer with GTK experience is costlier"

I think you are confusing skill valuation, and operational productivity. Some have an erroneous notion talent is interchangeable. Likewise, applicants with identical base skill-sets on their CV often mistakenly believe they even have long-term employment options (outsourced, youth tax credit churn, and or senior wage suppression).

Most FOSS people are easier to train, as most already can mitigate utter chaos already. =)

There are a few like that in the C++ community. WxWidgets is the most famous/popular with this approach. But it is a library almost impossible to use in other languages because their api is heavily templated.