Re:Why not tell people to “simply” use pyenv, poetry or anac...
by wongarsu on Tuesday June 13, 2023 @07:33AM
(#36308628)
In Python at least you "only" have to figure out venv, pip and conda and you're mostly set. In C/C++ world adding a dependency is such a pain that most projects have less than five dependencies. Most of the time it's simpler to just quickly write and debug a worse version yourself than to figure out how to find and integrate a library. Until you reach sufficient scale, at which point the sane thing seems to be to make your own build system instead
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Why not tell people to “simply” use pyenv, poetry or anac...
by logicchains on Tuesday June 13, 2023 @07:39AM
(#36308713)
>In Python at least you "only" have to figure out venv, pip and conda and you're mostly set. In C/C++ world adding a dependency is such a pain that most projects have less than five dependencies. Most of the time it's simpler to just quickly write and debug a worse version yourself than to figure out how to find and integrate a library.
That's from the developer's perspective, not the user's. The user of a C++ project doesn't have to care about any of that; they just run the binary, or ./configure && make to build from source. The user of a Python project has to struggle through worst case days of pain depending on how many dependencies are randomly broken.
Re:Why not tell people to “simply” use pyenv, poetry or anac...
by wongarsu on Tuesday June 13, 2023 @07:43AM
(#36308764)
If your user is interacting with the package ecosystem, you already failed multiple steps. Which python projects are routinely doing, but that's a cultural issue about packaging.
For "users" that have to touch the code: well, those get the full developer's perspective. And I've lost more hours than I would like to admit trying to get C++ projects to build. A project has to be really small or packaged really well to make it as simple as ./configure && make