Conan C/C++ Package Manager

Conan is a decentralized, open-source package manager for C and C++ developers, designed to solve the dependency management challenges that have historically plagued the C/C++ ecosystem. Created by Diego Rodriguez-Losada and Luis Martinez de Bartolome at JFrog in 2015, later becoming independent as ConanCenterIndex community project with over 8,300 stars as of 2026. Key features include: decentralized package registry (supporting private and public Conan servers, Artifactory, and ConanCenter with over 2,000 open-source C/C++ packages), cross-platform (Windows, Linux, macOS with support for multiple compilers including GCC, Clang, MSVC, and Intel), multi-configuration builds (Debug, Release, RelWithDebInfo with separate binary packages per platform, compiler, architecture, and build type), package recipes (conanfile.py in Python defining build steps, dependencies, and settings, enabling reproducible builds), binary package management (pre-built binaries cached locally and on remote servers, eliminating compilation time for common dependencies), transitive dependency resolution (automatically resolving and managing the full dependency graph with conflict detection), package binary compatibility (managing ABI compatibility across compiler versions and standard library implementations), integration with build systems (CMake, Makefiles, MSBuild, pkg-config, and Meson via generators), custom generators (extensible generator framework for any build system), versioning strategies (SemVer, revision-based, and SCM-based versioning with channels for pre-release testing), lockfiles (reproducible builds with locked dependency versions and revisions), Conan profiles (defining build settings like OS, compiler, architecture, and build type as reusable profiles), and CI/CD integration (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, and custom CI pipelines).