@HunterZ@mastodon.sdf.org @aphyr@woof.group (as a C++ developer, and a hobbyist one that worked on distributing a cross platform C++ api wrapper for a popular chat application) We have things like GNU autotools with configure that help minimize the amount of work. Honestly? It didn't come up as much as you'd expect. We were not using autotools, but instead cmake and although we had difficulty with making FindWhatever.cmake we eventually got the hang of it and dropped the recommendation to use vcpkg, instead hoping that users would rely on their system's package manager. Another thing to consider is that thanks to the great work of musl (i know it's a lib c) i've seen a variety of things be statically linked to it, running on glibc systems, musl perfectly fine. Static linking is very well optimized it does not include everything, just the stuff you need for your program to run.