Yeah I looked at conan and you can specify git projects to install which is nice. I expect vcpkg to be great for a Windows / Visual Studio setup but I'm on Mac/Linux so haven't really looked. Even with Conan I've not found something as nice as gems/pip/npm for ease of use and it's one of the reasons I end up looking at Rust - because cargo is so familiar to me from a Python background.

Edit: I saw a project recently written in C++ and they had subrepos in a `deps/` directory and then linked to those, so it was all manually managed. If I were to make a new project in C++ I think that's how I'd go too.