Day 2 (Shaders) - Reddit people hate Conan, well now I do too

Jan 25, 2025

Conan was my choice for package manager for C++ projects. I thought it was the best because it came up first in the search results.

There were rough edges, at first I didn’t know how to

1. Install the libraries
2. Link the libraries
3. Integrating with CMake… but that’s not Conan’s fault (I didn’t know how to write a CMakeLists.txt)

And today I had to link stb_image which is a header-only library. I thought it would be easy to just add it to the requirements.txt but it wasn’t…

VSCode was complaining that it couldn’t find the header file. So I tried to use the Quick Fix feature but VSCode just straight up recommended me to use another package manager.

I was like what? Is that a thing? Is Conan that bad? And they we found the image above.

Getting started

As a proud ✨Javascript Developer✨, not being able to npm install -g bun was a bummer.

I can’t install a new package manager with my old package manager?? Microsoft, I thought you were used to people using Edge to download Chrome.

Jokes aside, I think I should get used to git clone and do things manually because C++ people does that a lot.

But the installation is easy enough. We just have to run bootstrap-vcpkg.bat and done! The vcpkg binary will appear in the directory.

Also, haha funny, Microsoft.

vcpkg on  master via 🐍 v3.12.2 (quatton) on ☁️  (ap-northeast-1) 
❯ ./bootstrap-vcpkg.sh
Downloading vcpkg-macos...
vcpkg package management program version 2025-01-24-874e302b1fa28cc81caefbb1483f80103c51ab52

See LICENSE.txt for license information.
Telemetry
---------
vcpkg collects usage data in order to help us improve your experience.
The data collected by Microsoft is anonymous.
You can opt-out of telemetry by re-running the bootstrap-vcpkg script with -disableMetrics,
passing --disable-metrics to vcpkg on the command line,
or by setting the VCPKG_DISABLE_METRICS environment variable.

Read more about vcpkg telemetry at docs/about/privacy.md

vcpkg on  master via 🐍 v3.12.2 (quatton) on ☁️  (ap-northeast-1) 
❯ ./bootstrap-vcpkg.sh --disable-metrics
Unknown argument --disable-metrics. Use '-help' for help.

Now we just add the path to the environment variables and we can use vcpkg from the command line.

tinygl on  main [!?⇡] via △ v3.31.0 via 🐍 v3.12.2 (quatton) on ☁️  (ap-northeast-1) 
❯ vcpkg --version
vcpkg package management program version 2025-01-24-874e302b1fa28cc81caefbb1483f80103c51ab52

See LICENSE.txt for license information.

Migrating from Conan to vcpkg

First of all I removed conanfile.py and replace it with vcpkg.json.

{
    "name": "tinygl",
    "version": "0.1",
    "dependencies": [
        "glfw",
        "glad",
        "stb",
        "glm"
    ]
}

And then just… follow the instructions.

Remember when we had Justfile?

-  conan install . --build=missing --settings build_type=Debug
+configure:
+  cmake --preset=default
 
 build:
-  conan build . --settings build_type=Debug
+  cmake -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=${VCPKG_ROOT}/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake .
 
-run:
+run: build
   ./build/tinygl
 
 clean:

I have modified it to not use Conan, but I guess it reallt doesn’t matter because I realized that I could’ve just build with F7 in VSCode.

And… it should work…

Day 2

Well, Day 2 is about

1. Writing shaders
2. Refactoring the shader compilation code into a class
3. Loading textures
4. Also I installed glsl_analyzer so now we have auto-completion for GLSL (and a formatter!)
5. State management and keyboard event

I wanna complete OpenGL as soon as possible so I can move on to wgpu and now we will write stuff for web so I can use my blog as a playground!

For the state management part I thought I should create a variable inside main and pass the reference to the process event function but it seems like it did not work. I had to resort to using a global variable.

It seems like the keyboard press event runs multiple times when I hold a key. I think it makes sense because it is just holds a state and we read it every frame, not like a listener that listens to the event and triggers a callback.

That concludes Day 2. I will continue tomorrow.