Managing Dependencies

Hieroglyph 3 has two primary dependencies - Lua and DirectXTK. Lua is used to provide simple scripting support, while DirectXTK is used for loading textures. Both of these libraries are included in the Hieroglyph 3 repository in source form. This allows for easy building with different build configurations and options, but it also comes with a number of costs as well.

First of all, you have to manually update your own repository whenever your dependencies make changes - or risk falling behind with the latest and greatest changes. In addition, since there are lots of source files in each of these dependencies, it bulks up the repository which makes cloning slower and increases the size of the repository overall.

Another big down side is that when you rebuild the entire solution, you have to rebuild all of the dependencies as well. This is sometimes a good thing (as mentioned above about the various build options) but in general it just adds time to the build process. Since the dependencies don't really change very often, then doing a full rebuild is needlessly longer than it should be.

Managing Dependencies with NuGet

With the most recent commit of Hieroglyph 3, I have replaced the DirectXTK source distribution with a reference to a NuGet package. If you aren't familiar with NuGet, it is basically a package manager that you can use to automatically download and install pre-built dependencies. This is actually old news for .net developers, who have had access to NuGet for quite some time. However, for native C++ developers, this is a relatively new facility for managing the type of dependencies discussed above.

The package manager console is built right into Visual Studio, making it easy to count on your users having access to it. Overall, I spent about 10 minutes trying things out, and with a single 'Install-Package directxtk' command, I was in business.

So now, I have a single XML file that references direcxtk, and when you build, the needed library and include files are automatically downloaded if they haven't already been. This actually solves most of the issues mentioned above, without bulking up the repository with large lib files. I'm trying this out with the DirectXTK first, and if it works out well then I will also update the Lua dependency as well.

In fact, if it works as well as advertised, I may even build a NuGet package out of Hieroglyph 3 for simple installation and use of the library...