Building C++: It Doesn't Have to be Painful! - Nicole Patricia Mazzuca - NDC TechTown 2025

This talk was recorded at NDC TechTown in Kongsberg, Norway. #ndctechtown #ndcconferences #developer #softwaredeveloper

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reMarkable is working on turning our monorepo into many repositories, and as part of that we have a unique chance to rewrite our build system as we pull components out, but with code behind them. This has meant that I've had a unique opportunity to work on a CMake build system library (named rho) that takes care of all of the hard parts for you, and gives you a simple, declarative set up which slots into existing CMake build systems, allowing you to fix your build system to be declarative over time.

It takes care of all the annoying stuff – platform-dependence, feature flags, dependencies, installation; and leaves you with the task of simply defining your library (and executable), and where your source files are located.

This has been in use at reMarkable while it is still in development among teams that are doing the pulling out of their components, and it's gotten rave reviews from all of them. I hope to share this method for multi-repository product development with the NDC Techtown crowd.