The project cpp-dev (short: cpd) combines existing state-of-the-art C++ tooling to ease the development and exchange of C++ libraries across different platforms. The ultimate long-term goal is to achieve a development workflow comparable with the ecosystems of other programming languages (e.g. Rust or Python).
WARN:
This project is currently work in progress and not yet in a functional state. Please check the feature table below about which features are already supported.
Please check the complete documentation at: cpp-dev documentation.
INFO: This project currently only supports Ubuntu 24.04. This hard requirement will get dropped after a first release is made availabe to have some value-add initially (guideline: feature completeness before increasing the operating system support).
This project is not yet available as official Python package due to the early development state.
Therefore, testing out cpp-dev requires the source code to be checked out locally.
The pre-requisite to run cpp-dev is to have the Python uv tool installed on your machine - please follow the uv documentation for further instructions.
Afterwards, call the following command to check that cpp-dev is properly installed.
uv run cpd version
cpp-dev version 0.0.1Alternatively, use the virtual environment to directly use the cpd cli.
uv sync
source .venv/bin/activate
(cpp-dev) cpd version
cpp-dev version 0.0.1The documentation of the high-level workflow assumes that the environment is setup with the Python venv sourced in your shell (instead of using the uv run wrapper).
The tables below show the status for features and operating systems.
| Feature | Status |
|---|---|
| Tool Initialization |  |
| Project Initialization |  |
| Operating System | Status |
|---|---|
| Ubuntu 24.04 |  |
cpp-dev is designed as a tool around the following external tools:
- Package Management: Conan2
- Build System: CMake, Ninja
- Toolchain: LLVM-based (clang, clang-format, clang-coverage, clang-sanitizer, clang-tidy)
- Test framework: gtest and gmock
- Code coverage: lcov
cpp-dev uses Conan2 as package management such that all packages created by cpp-dev are usable in other configurations for which Conan2 generators exist, e.g. CMake.
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Why another tool to increase the already high complexity of the tool landscape? C++ is a lovely wonderful language, but getting started has a too high complexity in my opinion. I would love to implement smaller utilities using some of the great features of later C++ standards, but the reusability is often harder for smaller (private) projects. Other ecosystems nicely show that good tooling can be really simple to use.
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Why the hell is the tool written in Python and not C++? I really love C++ with all its magic and power, but bootstrapping a new project has a too high complexity. Python is thereby a good example for how the tooling could look like. Additionally, this tool uses Conan2 intensively which is written in Python.
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Who is the target audience of the tool? C++ experts already have their setup with pre-defined templates for the different tools (CMake, Clang, etc.), but people who want to start exploring the power of C++ (hopefully, there are still people who want to learn C++) could find this tooling helpful.
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Why is there a hard limitation to Ubuntu 24.04? Ubuntu is probably still one of the mostly used Linux-based operating systems. The goal right now is to build a proof-of-concept to see if there is even a future for such a tooling. If the tooling turns out to be useful, the limitations would obviously be relaxed to reach more people.
cpp-dev is currently in an early development and evaluation phase. Contributions are welcome in terms of code contributions, conceptual feedback ("the idea is bulls**t is also a highly valued feedback if good arguments are given) and additional ideas.