Yeah, I own the build system for our code which is all in Python. Pip is the package manager, not the build system, but your greater point stands: Python’s build tooling isn’t great (although pipenv is a significant improvement).
While few tools match up to Cargo, CMake is still uniquely unpleasant in my view. Most others aren’t fully imperative programming languages and at least have some ability or convention for locating sources. Many serve as a package manager or they dovetail nicely with a package manager. Go’s package manager story is a work in progress but I still prefer it to CMake (no contest).
My point isn’t that you should use a different language, my point is that CMake doesn’t compare to the tooling in other languages and there isn’t a compelling reason—it’s success is a historical accident, and I hope the community arrives at something better. I’m of the impression that there are other tools that are interested in solving this problem and I wish them luck.
> I hope the community arrives at something better.
Yes. That's the opinion of most everyone, including KitWare, it appears.
All of this is frankly a language defect. If working on build and packaging problems seems like a waste of time, then C and C++ are not good choices for you. Otherwise, dealing with all this is a job requirement, at least for senior engineers.
C++ is working on modules. Solving these problems seems to be downstream of that. I wouldn't count on de facto standard packaging tools for another decade. And there's a good chance that there will be forum threads about how annoying those tools are.
While few tools match up to Cargo, CMake is still uniquely unpleasant in my view. Most others aren’t fully imperative programming languages and at least have some ability or convention for locating sources. Many serve as a package manager or they dovetail nicely with a package manager. Go’s package manager story is a work in progress but I still prefer it to CMake (no contest).
My point isn’t that you should use a different language, my point is that CMake doesn’t compare to the tooling in other languages and there isn’t a compelling reason—it’s success is a historical accident, and I hope the community arrives at something better. I’m of the impression that there are other tools that are interested in solving this problem and I wish them luck.