this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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Programming

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Why hasn't gradle been adopted for C/C++ projects? (self.programming)
submitted 2 weeks ago by onlinepersona to c/programming
15 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I know little about gradle and have only just started exploring it, so this is just a question out of curiosity.

It's supposedly a language agnostic dependency manager and builder, yet it seems to have only found its niche in Java. C/C++ projects could definitely do with dependency resolution...

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

Here are a couple of reasons:

  • C and C++ projects often predate Gradle by decades they will not change their build system without a compelling reason.
  • Gradle is written in Java and requires a Java Runtime.
  • At least for C++, CMake has pretty much become the standard build tool.
  • Dependency resolution on Linux was 'solved' by relying on the distribution. Today, there also exist package managers for C and C++ like vcpkg or conan and they also integrate with CMake.
[–] 0x0 14 points 2 weeks ago

Cmake tends to be the upgrade path for sure, gradle is... hideous, i have having to use it for android.

[–] onlinepersona 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Are vcpkg and conan widespread in your experience? Mine has still been majorly "works on my machine with unnamed debian version and unrestricted library version", which still breaks like 90% of the time.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

I know a bunch of larger C++ apps that use vcpkg for cross-platform (Windows/macOS/Linux) builds of their dependencies and it seems to work pretty well

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

I worked on a couple commercial C++ applications that used vcpkg. It's not as convenient as nuget, cargo or npm but it think it is a massive improvement over manually hunting for dependencies.