> Why is something which shall makes things easy and secure so complicated? > I'm used to: > > g++ -o hello hello.cpp

That is simple, because C++ inherited C's simplistic, primitive, and unsafe compilation and abstraction model of brute-force textual inclusion. When you scale this to a large project with hundreds of thousands of translation units, every command-line invocation becomes a huge list of flag soup that plain Makefiles become intractable.

Almost all other reasonably-recent programming languages have all of the following:

- a strong coupling of dependency management, building, installation, and publishing tools

- some description of a directed acyclic graph of dependencies, whether it be requirements.txt, cargo.toml, Maven, dotnet and Nuget .csproj files, Go modules, OPAM, PowerShell gallery, and more

- some way to describe the dependencies within the source code itself

C++20 modules are a very good thing, and enforce a stronger coupling between compiler and build tool; it's no longer just some weekend project chucking flags at g++/clang++/cl.exe but analysing source code, realising it needs a, b, c, x, y, z modules, ensuring those modules are built and export the necessary symbols, and then compiling the source at hand correctly. That is what `clang-scan-deps` does: https://clang.llvm.org/docs/StandardCPlusPlusModules.html#di...

I concede there are two problems with C++20 modules: we didn't have a working and correct compiler implementation before the paper was accepted into C++20, and secondly, the built/binary module interface specification is not fixed, so BMIs aren't (yet) portable across compilers.

The Meson developer is notorious for stirring the pot with respect to both the build system competition, and C++20 modules. The Reddit thread on his latest blog post provides a searing criticism for why he is badly mistaken: https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1n53mpl/we_need_to_ser...

Universal source package management would have been better time spent.

This doesn’t solve any problem that wasn’t self-inflicted.

I agree on your points about having a working implementation before the paper was accepted, this is why C++ is a mess and will never be cleaned up. I love C++ but man, things like this are plenty.

Thank you.