In my experience, no one does build systems right; Cargo included.

The standard was initially meant to standardize existing practice. There is no good existing practice. Very large institutions depending heavily on C++ systematically fail to manage the build properly despite large amounts of third party licenses and dedicated build teams.

With AI, how you build and integrate together fragmented code bases is even more important, but someone has yet to design a real industry-wide solution.

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lenkite 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Speedy convenience beats absolute correctness anyday. Humans are not immortal and have finite amount of time for life and work. If convenience didn't matter, we would all still be coding in assembly or toggling hardware switches.

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jjmarr 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

C++ builds are extremely slow because they are not correct.

I'm doing a migration of a large codebase from local builds to remote execution and I constantly have bugs with mystery shared library dependencies implicitly pulled from the environment.

This is extremely tricky because if you run an executable without its shared library, you get "file not found" with no explanation. Even AI doesn't understand this error.

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mgaunard 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

The dynamic linker can clearly tell you where it looks for files and in which order, and where it finds them if it does.

You can also very easily harden this if you somehow don't want to capture libraries from outside certain paths.

You can even build the compiler in such a way that every binary it produces has a built-in RPATH if you want to force certain locations.

	▲	jjmarr a minute ago \| parent [-]
		That is what I'm doing so I can get distributed builds working. It sucks and has taken me days of work.

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morning-coffee 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter missions would beg to differ.

(And "absolute" or other adjectives don't qualify "correctness"... it simply is or isn't.)