For a modern C++ project, there is always a lot of repetitive preparation work. Not to mention configuring test environments, continuous integration, etc. This project template is designed to alleviate this to some extent by drawing from the best of many projects and constantly updating.
For external dependencies, we have two main ways to use them:
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Pre-compiled binaries
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Compile from scratch
If we use pre-compiled binaries, we can greatly reduce the compilation time of our project, especially if the external dependencies are very large and particularly time-consuming to compile (e.g. Boost). If we need to distribute, we can just distribute our own program, and the rest of the dependencies can be dynamically dependent on the runtime environment.
If we compile from scratch, we no longer need to rely on the target environment to have the dependencies we need. We can easily compile the entire project from anywhere and strictly control the versioning of each dependency, making source code distribution much easier.
However, nothing is absolute, and we can combine them to maximize their respective advantages.
For Linux platforms, pre-compiled binaries seem to be the best choice, and the various distributions have their own reliable package managers, so there is nothing to worry about.
But the Windows platform is a bit awkward, it does not have a unified path to install various pre-compiled binary dependencies, and there is no proper package manager.
The good thing is that the situation has improved somewhat, now there are C++ package managers such as:
They have their own merits and will not be discussed too much in this project.
This project is to demonstrate project management using NuGet (on Windows platform) and using CPM (Windows or Linux platform).
Maybe we’ll consider using vcpkg later, but for now it’s a bit "uncontrollable".
see License.