by dzogchen 7 hours ago
> Anyone who’s fought with CMake or dealt with header file dependencies knows this pain. For a small team trying to move quickly, we didn’t want to waste time debugging build configuration issues.
I find this take a bit hard to believe. There's no way that Zig is some kind of magic bullet that avoids build configuration challenges. Especially not considering you are building a browser on top of V8 in a different programming language.
CMake is quite crufty, but there's toolchains for every system under the Sun and this is what makes it actually less painful in a lot of cases. Glossing over your build files it does not look particularly scalable or portable. Nice that Zig allows you to write build config in Zig though.
I think CMake is cool when it works, but debugging it when it doesn't is hell. I've often spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out why doesn't it pick up library paths.
And although I know Microsoft is uncool, I still want to shill vckpkg as it seems they finally managed to create a usable cross platform package manager for C++