The problem with these build tools is never the tool itself (though admittedly I never get far enough to test them). It's the lack of packages in the repositories that back them up. For build2, the central repository is
https://cppget.org/ which has 24 packages. 24!! For comparison, npm has more than 600,000 and PyPI has more than 140,000. Now of course not all of those are great quality, but it does illustrate the scale of the problem.
More concretely: As a go-to example for these repos I always look for Google's protobuf library. Most projects I work on depend on three or four high-level libraries which, in turn, depend on protobuf; if even protobuf isn't there (as is the case at cppget.org) then it's hopeless that those higher-level libraries will be.
So far, the best native package manager I've come across is vcpkg [1]. I hate that it's made by Microsoft, and I hate that it uses CMake, but there is no easier to build and use e.g. gRPC on Windows. They recently added Linux and Mac support (static linking only). Edit: for fair comparison, it has just over 700 packages.
[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg
More concretely: As a go-to example for these repos I always look for Google's protobuf library. Most projects I work on depend on three or four high-level libraries which, in turn, depend on protobuf; if even protobuf isn't there (as is the case at cppget.org) then it's hopeless that those higher-level libraries will be.
So far, the best native package manager I've come across is vcpkg [1]. I hate that it's made by Microsoft, and I hate that it uses CMake, but there is no easier to build and use e.g. gRPC on Windows. They recently added Linux and Mac support (static linking only). Edit: for fair comparison, it has just over 700 packages.
[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg