I encounter this on a fairly regular basis - a project uses a third-party library and there is either a bug in the library that we can’t seem to avoid hitting, or there’s a feature missing or not 100% ideal for our use case.

Especially when dealing with an open source library, at this point someone will inevitably suggest that we have the source, so we should just fix/hack/modify the library and get on with our lives. I’m massively opposed to that approach, with essentially one exception I’ll mention towards the end.

Every reasonably sized C++ project these days will use some third party libraries. Some of them like boost are viewed as extensions of the standard libraries that no sane developer would want to be without. Then there is whatever GUI toolkit your project uses, possibly another toolkit to deal with data access, the ACE libraries, etc etc. You get the picture.

Somehow, these third party libraries have to be integrated into your development and build process in such a way that they don’t become major stumbling blocks. I’ll discuss a few approaches that I have encountered in the multitude of projects I was part of, and will discuss both their advantages and problems.