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▲ jandrese 4 days ago

You also don't do "rustc build". Cargo is a build system too.

The whole point of pkg-config is to tell the compiler where those packages are.

I mean yeah, that's the point of having a tool like that. It's fine that the compiler doesn't know that, because its job is turning source into executables, not being the OS glue.

I'm not sure "having a linker" is a weakness? What are talking about?

It is true that you need to use the package manager to install the dependencies. This is more effort than having a package manager download them for you automatically, but on the other hand you don't end up in a situation where you need virtual environments for every application because they've all downloaded slightly different versions of the same packages. It's a bit of a philosophical argument as to what is the better solution.

The argument that it is too hard for students seems a bit overblown. The instructions for getting this up and running are:

    1. apt install build-essential
    2. extract the example files (Makefile and c file), cd into the directory
    3. type "make"
    4. run your program with ./programname
I'd argue that is fewer steps than setting up almost any IDE. The Makefile is 6 lines and is easy to adapt to any similar size project. The only major weakness is headers, in which case you can do something like:

    HEADERS=headerA.h headerB.h headerC.h

    file1.o: $(HEADERS)
    file2.o: $(HEADERS)
    file3.o: $(HEADERS)
If you change any header it will trigger a full system rebuild, but on C projects this is fine for a long time. It's just annoying that you have to create a new entry for every c file you add to the project instead of being able to tell make to add that to every object automatically. I suspect there is a very arcane way to do this, but I try to keep it as simple as possible.
▲steveklabnik 4 days ago | parent [-]

I'm not your parent, but the overall point of this kind of thing is that all of these individual steps are more annoying and error-prone than one command that just takes care of it. `cargo build` is all you need to build the vast majority of Rust projects. No need to edit the Makefile for those headers, or remember which commands you need to install the various dependencies, and name them individually, figuring out which name maps to your distro's naming scheme, etc. It's not just "one command vs five" it's "one command for every project vs five commands that differ slightly per project and per platform". `make` can come close to this, and it's why people love `./configure; make`, and there's no inherent reason why this couldn't paper over some more differences to make it near universal, but that still only gets you Unix platforms.

> but on the other hand you don't end up in a situation where you need virtual environments for every application because they've all downloaded slightly different versions of the same packages.

The real downside here is that if you need two different programs with two different versions of packages, you're stuck. This is often mitigated by things like foo vs foo2, but I have been in a situation where two projects both rely on different versions of foo2, and cannot be unified. The per-project dependency strategy handles this with ease, the global strategy cannot.