alt Hacker NewsWhen I used to work with C many years ago, it was basically: download the headers and the binary file for your platform from the official website, place them in the header/lib paths, update the linker step in the Makefile, #include where it's needed, then use the library functions. It was a little bit more work than typing "npm install", but not so much as to cause headaches.
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And with header only libraries (like stb) its even less than that.
I primarily write C nowadays to regain sanity from doing my day job, and the fact that there is zero bit rot and setup/fixing/middling to get things running is in stark contrast to the horrors I have to deal with professionally.
And then you got some minor detail different from the compiled library and boom, UB because some struct is layed out differently or the calling convention is wrong or you compiled with a different -std or …
What do you do when the code you downloaded refers to symbols exported by libraries not already on your system? How do you figure out where those symbols should come from? What if it expects version-specific behavior and you’ve already installed a newer version of libwhatever on your system (I hope your distro package manager supports downgrades)?
These are very, very common problems; not edge cases.
Put another way: y'all know we got all these other package management/containerization/isolation systems in large part because people tried the C-library-install-by-hand/system-package-all-the-things approaches and found them severely lacking, right? CPAN was considered a godsend for a reason. NPM, for all its hilarious failings, even moreso.