In Defense of C++ | slacker news

I believe most C++ gripes are a classic case of PEBKAC.

One of the most common complaints is the lack of a package manager. I think this stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how the ecosystem works. Developers accustomed to language-specific dependency managers like npm or pip find it hard to grasp that for C++, the system's package manager (apt, dnf, brew) is the idiomatic way to handle dependencies.

Another perpetual gripe is that C++ is bad because it is overly complex and baroque, usually from C folks like Linus Torvalds[1]. It's pretty ironic, considering the very compiler they use for C (GCC), is written in C++ and not in C.

[1]: Torvalds' comment on C++ <https://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus>

> Developers accustomed to language-specific dependency managers like npm or pip find it hard to grasp that for C++, the system's package manager (apt, dnf, brew) is the idiomatic way to handle dependencies.

Okay, but is that actually a good idea? Merely saying that something is idiomatic isn't a counterargument to an allegation that the ecosystem has converged on a bad idiom.

For software that's going to be distributed through that same package manager, yes, sure, that's the right way to handle dependencies. But if you're distributing your app in a format that makes the dependencies self-contained, or not distributing it at all (just running it on your own machines), then I don't see what you gain from letting your operating system decide which versions of your dependencies to use. Also this doesn't work if your distro doesn't happen to package the dependency you need. Seems better to minimize version skew and other problems by having the files that govern what versions of dependencies to use (the manifest and lockfile) checked into source control and versioned in lockstep with the application code.

Also, the GCC codebase didn't start incorporating C++ as an implementation language until eight years after Linus wrote that message.