I know little about gradle and have only just started exploring it, so this is just a question out of curiosity.

It’s supposedly a language agnostic dependency manager and builder, yet it seems to have only found its niche in Java. C/C++ projects could definitely do with dependency resolution…

  • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de
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    7 days ago

    Here are a couple of reasons:

    • C and C++ projects often predate Gradle by decades they will not change their build system without a compelling reason.
    • Gradle is written in Java and requires a Java Runtime.
    • At least for C++, CMake has pretty much become the standard build tool.
    • Dependency resolution on Linux was ‘solved’ by relying on the distribution. Today, there also exist package managers for C and C++ like vcpkg or conan and they also integrate with CMake.
    • 0x0@programming.dev
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      7 days ago

      Cmake tends to be the upgrade path for sure, gradle is… hideous, i have having to use it for android.

      • corsicanguppy
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        5 days ago

        What you do is you put “compatible with Debian 2024 and Ubuntu 202502 and rocky8 over its entire lifetime” because you tested it and you don’t rinkydink with bizarre custom shit because it makes a really frail platform that causes everyone headaches.

        This “you have to use this library from this particular week’s release” is very CPAN; and not in a good way.

      • paperplane@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        I know a bunch of larger C++ apps that use vcpkg for cross-platform (Windows/macOS/Linux) builds of their dependencies and it seems to work pretty well

      • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de
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        7 days ago

        I worked on a couple commercial C++ applications that used vcpkg. It’s not as convenient as nuget, cargo or npm but it think it is a massive improvement over manually hunting for dependencies.