The idea is great, the execution is terrible. In JS, modules were instantly popular because they were easy to use, added a lot of benefit, and support in browsers and the ecoysystem was fairly good after a couple of years. In C++, support is still bad, 6 years after they were introduced.

No idea if modules themselves are failed or no, but if c++ wants to keep fighting for developer mindshare, it must make something resembling modules work and figure out package management.

yes you have CPM, vcpkg and conan, but those are not really standard and there is friction involved in getting it work.

"Failed idea" gives modules too much credit. Outside old codebases, almost no one outside C++ diehards have the patience for the build and tooling circuss they create, and if you need fast iteration plus sane integration with existing deps, modules are like trading your shoes for roller skates in a gravel lot. Adopting them now feels like volunteering to do tax forms in assembbly.

Agreed, arcane cmake configs and or bash build scripts are genuinely off-putting. Also cpp "equivalents" of cargo which afaik are conan and vcpkg are not default and required much more configuring in comparison with cargo. Atleast this was my experience few years ago.

I didn’t think header only was that bad - now we have a nightmare of incompatible standards and compilers.

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.

I’m still surprised how people ignore Meson. Please test it :)

https://mesonbuild.com/

And Mesons awesome dependency handling:

https://mesonbuild.com/Dependencies.html

https://mesonbuild.com/Using-the-WrapDB.html#using-the-wrapd...

https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2026/02/c-and-c-dependencies...

I suffered with Java from Any, Maven and Gradle (the oldest is the the best). After reading about GNU Autotools I was wondering why the C/C++ folks still suffer? Right at that time Meson appeared and I skipped the suffering.

    * No XML
    * Simple to read and understand
    * Simple to manage dependencies
    * Simple to use options

Feel free to extend WrapDB.

Right, I think the tension here is that we would like contracts to exist in the language, but the current design isn't what it needs to be, and once it's standardized, it's extremely hard to fix.

The people who did contracts are aware of ada/spark and some have experience using it. Only time will tell if it works in c++ but they at least did all they could to give it a chance.

Note that this is not the end of contrats. This is a minimun viable start that they intend to add to but the missing parts are more complex.

C++ is the last language I'd add to any list of languages used for correct-by-design - it's underspecified in terms of semantics with huge areas of UB and IB. Given its vast complexity - at every level from the pre-processor to template meta-programming and concepts, I simply can't imagine any formal denotational definition of the language ever being developed. And without a formal semantics for the language, you cannot even start to think about proof of correctness.