How Do I Use Other Libraries as Dependencies?¶

Of course, fundamental to any build system is the question of consuming dependencies. dds takes an approach that is both familiar and novel.

The Familiar:

Dependencies are listed in a project’s package manifest file (package.json5, for dds).

A range of acceptable versions is provided in the package manifest, which tells dds and your consumers what versions of a particular dependency are allowed to be used with your package.

Transitive dependencies are resolved and pulled the same as if they were listed in the manifest as well.

The Novel:

dds does not have a separate “install” step. Instead, whenever a dds build is executed, the dependencies are resolved, downloaded, extracted, and compiled. Of course, dds caches every step of this process, so you’ll only see the download, extract, and compilation when you add a new dependency,

Additionally, changes in the toolchain will necessitate that all the dependencies be re-compiled. Since the compilation of dependencies happens alongside the main project, the same caching layer that provides incremental compilation to your own project will be used to perform incremental compilation of your dependencies as well.

Listing Package Dependencies¶

Suppose you have a project and you wish to use spdlog for your logging. To begin, we need to find a spdlog package. We can search via dds pkg search:

$ dds pkg search spdlog
    Name: spdlog
Versions: 1.4.0, 1.4.1, 1.4.2, 1.5.0, 1.6.0, 1.6.1, 1.7.0
    From: repo-1.dds.pizza
          No description

Note

If you do not see any results, you may need to add the main repository to your package database. Refer to Remote Packages and Repositories.

In the output above, we can see one spdlog group with several available versions. Let’s pick the newest available, 1.7.0.

If you’ve followed at least the Hello, World tutorial, you should have at least a package.json5 file present. Dependencies are listed in the package.json5 file under the depends key as an array of dependency statement strings:

{
  name: 'my-application',
  version: '1.2.3',
  namespace: 'myself',
  depends: [
    "spdlog^1.7.0"
  ]
}

The string "spdlog^1.7.0" is a dependency statement, and says that we want spdlog, with minimum version 1.7.0, but less than version 2.0.0. Refer to Compatible Range Specifiers for information on the version range syntax.

This is enough that dds knows about our dependency, but there is another step that we need to take:

Listing Usage Requirements¶

The depends is a package-level dependency, but we need to tell dds that we want to use a library from that package. For this, we need to provide a library.json5 file alongside the package.json5 file.

Using Dependencies¶

We’ve prepared our package.json5 and our library.json5, so how do we get the dependencies and use them in our application?

Simply use them. There is no separate “install” step. Write your application as normal:

src/app.main.cpp¶

#include <spdlog/spdlog.h>

int main() {
  spdlog::info("Hello, dependency!");
}

Now, when you run dds build, you’ll see dds automatically download spdlog as well as fmt (a dependency of spdlog), and then build all three components simultaneously. The result will be an app executable that uses spdlog.

Next: How Do I Use dds in a CMake Project?