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mountainriverHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I tried again recently for a proxy I was writing thinking surely things have evolved at this point

… I tried again recently for a proxy I was writing thinking surely things have evolved at this point. Every single package manager couldn’t handle my very basic and very popular dependencies. I mean I tried every single one. This is completely insane to me. Not to mention just figuring out how to build it after that which was a massive headache and an ongoing one. Compared to Rust it’s just night and day. Outside of embedded programming or some special use cases I have literally no idea why anyone would ever write C++. I’m convinced it’s a bunch of masochists

Original discussionMatt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++658 source comments · at import
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thrwyexecbrainHN

The C++ code I write these days is actually pretty similar to Rust: everything is explicit, lots of strong types, very simple and clear lifetimes (arenas, pools), non-owning handles instead of pointers. The only difference in practice is that the build systems are different and that the Rust compiler is more helpful (both in catching bugs and reporting errors). Neither a huge deal if you have a proper build and testing setup and when everybody on your team is pretty experienced. By the way, using "atoi" in a code snippet in 2025 and complaining that it is "not ideal" is, well, not ideal.

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almostgotcaughtHN

> Every single package manager couldn’t handle my very basic and very popular dependencies Well there's your problem - no serious project uses one. > I’m convinced it’s a bunch of masochists People use cpp because it's a mature language with mature tooling and an enormous number of mature libraries. Same exact reason anyone uses any language for serious work.

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runevaultHN

When I've dabbled in C++ recently it has felt like using CMake fetching github repos has been the least painful thing I've tried (dabbled in vcpkg and conan a bit), since most libraries are cmake projects. I am no expert so take it with a grain of salt, but that was how it felt for me.

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morsecodistHN

Agreed. I have had almost the same experience. The package management and building alone makes Rust worth it for me.

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ValtteriLHN

Felt the same pain with vcpkg. Ended up using OS packages and occasionally simply downloading a pure header based dependency. With Nix, the package selection is great and repackaging is fairly straight forward.

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