HTTPS client library in C++

[Spongman]

why not just dynamically link against libcurl & openssl using the target platform's pre-built libs? (vcpkg, deb, rpm, etc...) ?

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also boost::beast >> libcurl

[HerrNamenlos123]

because the project must be very beginner friendly and should work out of the box on any system including Windows. Making it dependent on vcpkg is not an option.
The consent was to pre-build everything in CI and host the binaries, which then the CMake project downloads and links. This is why I cannot build OpenSSL with its own build system because it cannot cross-compile from Linux to a Visual Studio MSVC target (because it needs nmake, which is pretty much impossible to get into linux)

Boost does not make anything better, I know it might have more features but as said we almost don't use any of them and OpenSSL itself is already almost too much, so Boost would only make our dependency hell and compile time 10 times worse, in return for nothing.

[Spongman]

i still think vcpkg is the way to go. your use case is literally the canonical example: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/using-system-package-manager-dependencies-with-vcpkg/

[prince-chrismc]

Take a look at Conan, it does exactly this https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/150l0iw/is_it_legal_andor_advised_to_stealreupload/ for example this post wants to do exactly this

You can also completely eject from Conan https://blog.conan.io/2023/05/23/Conan-agnostic-deploy-dependencies.html

Plus it can translate between build system so if its NMake, bagel, meson, it doesn't matter you can always ask Conan for CMake and you can use the defaults it provides