Comment by dijit
5 years ago
Unlikely to be a library, either it's libc or it's homegrown.
The only thing most game companies do when it comes to external libraries is to copy the source code of it into their repo and never update it, ever.
OpenSSL is this way, it's a required installation for Playstation but debugging it is seriously hard, and perforce (the games industries version control of choice) can't handle external dependencies. Not to mention visual studio (the game industries IDE of choice..) can't handle debugging external libraries well either.
So, most game studios throw up the hands, say "fuck it" and practice a heavy amount of NIH.
Visual Studio keeps toying with the idea of a "NuGet for C++" and it is amazing that it still hasn't happened yet. It may seem to indicate that it isn't necessarily the IDE that can fix it, but the user's attitude. How much of the NIH and "just copy that dependency into the tree" is still encouraged for "security" [0] and "control"/"proprietary source"/"management" reasons?
[0] Despite it being an obvious anti-pattern that you aren't going to update dependencies that require copy/paste and manual merge reviews, so security problems should be obviously more rampant than in systems where updating a dependency to the latest security patch is a single install command line (or update button in a GUI), there still seems to be so many C++ devs that love to chime in to every HN thread on a package manager vulnerability that they don't have those vulnerabilities. They don't "have" dependencies to manage, no matter how many stale 0-Days they copied and pasted from outside projects, they don't count as "dependencies" because they are hidden who knows where in the source tree.
I suspect vcpkg is the choice they made, it will/does have support for private and binary repo's too
That certainly is the most recent attempt. They've had projects of one sort or another going back at least as far as 2013 from mentions in public blog posts but so far none of them seem to have got much traction with the community. Here's hoping it works this time?
In another decade, there's going to be a story here about somebody getting their hands on the original source for this game, and the JSON parser will be a 10-line function with "//TODO: optimize later" at the top.