Not really. When people talk about setting up a new project, they talk about starting a hello world project and build up from there.
Anyway, I'll bite. What would it take to add a dependency? If it exports a cmake config file which exports targets, all it takes is this:
find_package(MyDependency),
target_link_libraries(bar MyDependency::targetA MyDependency::targetB ... MyDependency::targetZ )
If it doesn't and it is instead a system library then you can even pass the library instead.
add_library(bar systemlibrary )
If the library exports no cmake config and you have anything exotic you can put together your own cmake find modules, and proceed to follow step A.
Alternatively, you can even bolt on something like Conan and just follow step A all the time.
> Differently put: a phrase "metabuild system" has (...)
Sorry, but do you actually have any concrete example of any difficulty setting up a C++ project?
The original reply said one dabbled C++ via "creative coding, graphics programming, etc.", which definitely needs dependencies from the beginning. Can you draw a nicely shaded triangle only with the C++ standard library?
> If the library exports no cmake config and you have anything exotic you can put together your own cmake find modules, and proceed to follow step A.
They are not exotic, libraries without cmake config are common. So, as I've said before, people had to come up with their own find modules and this requires lots of trial and error to get it right. Guaranteed, it might have been possible to collect those into some sort of registry (a la DefinitelyTyped for TypeScript .d.ts files), and probably something like Conan can provide that, but ideally that should have been built into CMake. And keep in mind that Cargo---something we were comparing against back in time---does all of them declaratively. (Arguably, from users' perspective, it can handle C/C++ dependencies better than CMake!)
Taken straight from Qt's page on OpenGL support:
find_package(Qt6 REQUIRED COMPONENTS OpenGL) target_link_libraries(mytarget PRIVATE Qt6::OpenGL)
https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtopengl-index.html
Do you feel this is too hard to setup?
It's not Qt6. The same goes for Qt5, which has been around for what, close to a decade?
And what's your point, exactly? That things are hard if you purposedly ignore all the examples that prove that things are patently easy and trivial? Because it seems evident to me that if you want to quickly setup a C++ project to try out stuff, a CMake project with single-digit lines of code that get you a window with an OpenGL context going is right what you'd be looking for.
But instead you complain that the choice of build system and framework made things easy? And that's why things are not hard
What exactly do you think is your point?
I have no doubt that people who work on big commercial C++ project have sensible build systems and documentation that's not too hard. But it's incredibly common when working in this art/graphics space to need to try to get someone's bitrotted random project without docs or build system running. Common to have to do that AND have to do it on another platform.
That said... Rust and OpenGL have quite an impedance mismatch, don't they?
The options are there to be used.
Take a look: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75270938/thread-pool-wit...
Differently put: a phrase "metabuild system" has both a lexical sense and an idealized sense. The lexical sense would be something that generates an input to build systems. The idealized sense would be something that does everything else not possible or difficult in build systems. CMake was definitely far from that ideal [1]; it was often simpler to make a configure script in your favorite language (and, for god's sake, not in M4) than using CMake.
[1] Was using a present tense but edited after realizing that I don't know much about recent changes to CMake. Still enough to justify my (and others') criticism.