If you’ve ever wished that CMake’s ExternalProject pattern could be lit on fire, launched into the sea, fished out of the sea and then incinerated via tactical nuclear strike before bundling up the ashes that are then launched into the sun, vcpkg is definitely something you should look into.

I’m no Microsoft fanboy. I’ve been in software dev for roughly 20 years at this point so generally view anything from Microsoft with genuine suspicion, so I get the hesitation to take it seriously. But it works across the big three (Windows, Linux, macOS) and is MIT licensed so I’d definitely recommend giving it a whirl.

The only serious knock against it is that they went the OG Homebrew route with a single Git repo containing all of their ports (equivalent to Homebrew Formulae). And then whoever designed the Git repo approach also knew slightly too much about Git internals and leveraged tree-ish refs as part of the versioning design which is just weird and confuses anyone that’s not spent time tearing into Git’s object model.

So basically, vcpkg is honestly a good tool that does what it does fairly well. It may not do everything you need, but if it can it’s amazing.

Also, the buried lede here is how vcpkg handles binary caching. Think of it like sccache but at the dependency level. I’ve seen it drop CI runs from over an hour to 10m purely because it helps skip building dependencies without resorting to bespoke caching strategies.

I know orojects that have chosen it for linux only work, but I got the feeling they regretted it. Conan is what I was using before I switched to cargo, and it was fine as long as everything in your tree was conan. Dependencies you could wrap, but dependents were a headache.