cabin

Cabin brings Cargo's sanity to C and C++. Written in Rust, it's an opinionated build system and package manager that uses declarative manifests and a predictable project layout, so a conventional C or C++ project builds and pulls dependencies without the usual CMake incantations. It's inspired by Cargo but diverges where C and C++ genuinely need it to.

The appeal is the same reason Rust developers love Cargo: one clear manifest, a predictable model, less time lost to build configuration. For simple, package-oriented projects, that's a real quality-of-life jump. It's backed by MITOU and Anthropic's Claude for Open Source program, and has a solid commit history.

Free under Apache 2.0, for anyone tired of hand-rolling build files.

The catch is that it's pre-1.0 and deliberately constrained. Cabin is not a fully programmable build system, that's a design choice, not an oversight. It's great for straightforward projects and a poor fit for complex, custom builds where CMake or Meson's flexibility is the whole point. Know which kind of project you have before you adopt it.