Hello,
some weeks ago I created a recipe for using the Rack SDK (1.1.6) with the Conan C/C++ Package Manager for plugin development. Now I had the time to write documentation and a usage example, so I can share it here.
The recipe itself is located at https://github.com/qno/conan-vcvrack-sdk. The example with documentation is located at https://github.com/qno/conan-vcvrack-sdk-plugin-example and contains a complete usage example with instructions for building a Rack plugin, so I can keep this post short.
The main reason for creating this recipe is on one side, I don’t like to setup manually the build environment (especially on Windows) and on the other side, I have seen that new developers here often struggle with setting up their build environment. With this recipe, the Conan package manager will take care of this.
The biggest advantage is that there is no need to manually install and setup MSYS2 and the MinGW toolchain under Windows. For Linux and MacOS all required build dependencies will also be automatically checked and installed. Additionally for Windows it is possible to develop a plugin with MS Visual Studio IDE, as with this recipe the necessary configuration can be generated as well (discussed already in this topic - Visual Studio as IDE). Another point is that you can use CMake instead of using Makefile and use a C++ IDE (Clion, QtCreator, VSCode etc.) that have builtin support for CMake based projects.
If someone will try this out, it would be nice to get some feedback here.