Vcpkg, Conan or Spack for C++ Dependencies in a CMake Project

I have been using Vcpkg a little and getting to know it better. I also took a look at Conan but haven’t really dove into Spack recently. I am interested in them all through the lens of a developer who wants to improve the handling of third-party dependencies. This isn’t intended to be exhaustive but more to examine a specific use case that interests me most: handling the dependencies for my project in the most elegant was possible where some dependencies are large needing some caching.

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Overreaching

I really wanted to be one of the cool kids and blog on a leap day yesterday but everything got a little hectic and if I am honest I just opened a bottle of wine when I finished work. So here we are on a mundane 1st of March, where we joined what I would consider one of the most mundane gym brands and went on our first workout there. Above you can see what my watch thinks of my efforts, summarizing it as overreaching!

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Toy Projects and Lego

And now for something completely different…a random glimpse into my mind and how I keep things fresh. I am not sure I have ever stated this for the internet at large but I like building Lego and you can see some of my Lego air and space exhibit in the photo. I was thinking about this in the context of programming projects and giving space to explore what is possible along with learning new skills without other pressures.

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DuckDB and C++

A few years ago I heard about a new database project called DuckDB, a new kind of database embracing columnar storage over the traditional row storage. The other thing, possibly the main thing at the time, was that it was designed to be embedded in your application. Even better it was developed in C++ and seemed to have extensive API coupled with a permissive license. Looking Back I started out writing stuff using what was the typical (at the time) LAMP stack where the database was always MySQL.

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Six Years Since Naturalizing

It is hard to believe my wife and I became naturalized US citizens six years ago! It was a long journey filled with uncertainty. I had friends while studying in England who were on similar journeys and while I empathized I had no idea what it was like. We held off from buying a home until we got green cards, and even then felt some apprehension at times and naturalization represented the final step where I finally felt like I belonged.

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CMake, Dependencies, Superbuilds and Vcpkg

I was a Gentoo developer before I got serious about C++ software development, and one of the things we hated most about packages was when they copied libraries into their codebase. From the developers point of view they just want to be able to build their codebase, and copying in code so you can just build it all in one go is the easiest way to achieve that if there is no solid packaging story.

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C++ Modules and CMake

I have been thinking about creating a new project for a while, one that abandons a lot of my previous style where I needed to support old compilers, operating systems, etc. I have no idea where this project leads, but it is something of a playground to approach the state-of-the-art as I see it. Using the latest features in C++, CMake and other parts of the ecosystem. It is targeting my preferred development environment which is a completely up to date Arch Linux desktop and other places may catch up at some point or this may be generalized to work more widely.

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Vacation 2023

We have been on a few overnight trips, day trips, celebrations, etc but with one thing and another we haven’t been away for what I would call a proper vacation. We haven’t really been away for more than a few days at a time. Some of that was pandemic, some of it was moving jobs (the first time), some of it was crazy inflation, some was moving jobs (the seconds time).

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New Job at Voltron Data

I started a new job at a startup called Voltron Data in July of this year! For anyone who follows me you may remember I only just moved jobs in 2020, leaving Kitware to take a position at Brookhaven National Lab. Moving jobs and house during the pandemic was a lot, I went pretty quiet, the pandemic was hard on many of us. Things didn’t work out as I had hoped and I did a lot of soul-searching over the last few years too.

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New PC Build

The last time I built a PC was before the pandemic, in upstate, before we moved down to Long Island. Before that it was way back in England before we moved to America. The last PC I built I couldn’t decide how much I would use it, and so I stayed fairly mid-range too, whereas this time I had more of a sense that I would make a lot of use of the machine.

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