I think C++ is a living proof that not having a standard tooling around the language makes the language a complete pain in the ass to use, with any other language that does standard package managing/tooling out of the box, I can just pin the versions, commit a file to the repository, and on any computer that I'm working on I just issue a single command and everything is handled for me; meanwhile one of the C++ projects I've been working on, it turned out that I cannot build it on my server because one of the libraries I'm using only worked with clang17 which my desktop OS provides but the Debian I'm using on my server is shipping with clang16, and the library was not compatible with the earlier version of some C++ implementation, meanwhile Arch on my desktop updated to clang18, which also broke the library in some fashion, so now I'm sitting here with two systems, one where I want to deploy my software, and one where I want to develop the software, both of which are completely defunct and unable to build my project anymore; now I have to figure out how to build the specific version of clang on both systems and ensure I override a bunch of environment variables when configuring the builds on both of these systems, and then do the same on every new computer I'm developing/deploying on - with a proper tool I could just tell the project file to "use this compiler with this version with this standard" and things would just work. Some people will tell you "yeah bro just use docker with this and that and you will have a reproducible build system everywhere", but the thing is - I do not want to learn a completely unrelated tool and spend hours writing some scripts just to be able to continue working on my project when in any other programming language (like Go, Rust, JS), I can just install the runtime, clone the repo, run a command, and everything is handled for me seamlessly like it should be in 2024.
The problem for me is a "political" one, not a matter of convenience: When I choose a linux distro I implicitly trust the distro maintainers to not backdoor the liveCD, so I might as well trust them to maintain packages transparently. If something happens upstream, we expect the distro maintainers to patch out undesirable behavior, integrate changes into the system as a whole or warn us of changes. Most distros are the same in functionality: the choice of a certain distro is mostly a choice of which political institution (such as a business or non-profit) that we trust to maintain the interoperability of the OS.
Languages need to be more agnostic than a package manager requires because I should not have to rope another organization into my trust model.
Cargo already goes too far in encouraging a single repository (crates.io) for everything through its default behavior. Who maintains crates.io? Where is the transparency? This is the most important information the user should know when deciding to use crates.io, which is whether or not they can trust the maintainers not to backdoor code, and it is rarely discussed or even mentioned!
The default cargo crate (template?) encourages people to use permissive licensing for their code. So that is an example where you are already making implicit political decisions on behalf of the ecosystem and developers. That is alarming and should not be for the language maintainers to decide at all.
In C/C++ you have a separation of the standard from the implementation. This is really what makes C/C++ code long-lived, because you do not have to worry about the standard being hijacked by a single group. You have a standard and multiple competing implementations, like the WWW. I cannot encourage the use of Rust while there is only a single widely-accepted implementation.
The problem with that is that no Linux distro maintainer will ever put effort into maintaining every version of every library and compiler perpetually for a specific, seemingly random, programming language (or at least, reasonably, within few major versions including all minor releases in between), but with a tool that versions dependencies and allows for, say, git-based upstream with tag-versioned releases, you can expect to pick any specific version and for things to just work; managing library code for a specific programming language, be it any language, does not seem like the responsibility of an operating system, if anything, the package manager from your OS should be able to just supply the tool to manage the said language (like you currently can with npm, cargo or go); that also does not touch the topic of making things work across different platforms, sure, you maybe found a way to solve this issue in your imaginary Linux distro, how do you solve the problem for a co-developer that uses Windows, or macOS?
Additionally, you do not have to necessarily enforce these things on the language level, the standard and the tooling could live as two independent projects coming from the same entity. You could still use the compiler and the libraries from your OS, and build the code like that, or you could just reach out to an optional standardized tool that serves as a glue for all the external tools in a standardized way.
Yes, there are a lot of valid concerns with this approach as well, but personally for me, as a frustrated C++ developer, who is most likely going to still use the language for a decade to come, I feel like all the other languages I had mentioned in my previous post had addressed what is my biggest point of frustration with C++, so it's definitely an issue that could be solved. Many tried to do it independently, but due to personal differences, no funding, and different ideas of what should be the scope of such tooling, we ended up with a very fragmented ecosystem of tools, none of which have yet to date been able to fully address an issue that other languages solved.
> The default cargo crate (template?) encourages people to use permissive licensing for their code. So that is an example where you are already making implicit political decisions on behalf of the ecosystem and developers. That is alarming and should not be for the language maintainers to decide at all.
You and I must be using two very different versions of Cargo, because on mine the default template doesn't specify a license.
What you are asking for is standard command line flags for the compiler. Which probably cannot happen though it would be nice.
That and a better package manager so your clang wrong version problem cannot have. Which is what I was trying to get at.
I'd recommend using upstream apt llvm repos if you are using Debian or debian-derivatives like Ubuntu, to make sure you have the same compiler everywhere.
> Some people will tell you "yeah bro just use docker with this and that and you will have a reproducible build system everywhere", but the thing is - I do not want to learn a completely unrelated tool and spend hours writing some scripts just to be able to continue working on my project
You're working with some seriously hairy technologies, dealing with very knotty compatibility issues, and you don't want to learn... Docker?
I find this odd because it's relatively simple (certainly much simpler that a lot of what you're currently dealing with), well documented, has a very small, simple syntax and would probably solve your problems with much less effort than setting up a third development machine.
Docker solves the problems in some cases. However it forces you to ignore those knotty compatibility issues which is limiting. (You can't run on *BSD, Mac, windows... if you use docker) As such for many docker is not in the list of acceptable answers - in particular any open source project should consider docker not an option to solve their problems.
My understanding of the post I was replying to was that the compatibility issues were due to different versions of Linux having different clang versions. If I've understood correctly then Docker is highly likely to be a good solution.
> any open source project should consider docker not an option to solve their problem
That's generalising far too much.