cabinpkg/cabin

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1484 stars · 93 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Cabin is an opinionated package manager and build system for C and C++ projects, inspired by Rust's Cargo. It uses a declarative cabin.toml manifest, resolves compilers and dependencies, and plans builds as a deterministic Ninja graph.

Use cases

• manage dependencies for a C/C++ project with a Cargo-style workflow
• scaffold a new C or C++ package with cabin new
• build C and C++ sources in one project with GCC, Clang, or MSVC
• get reproducible builds with lockfiles, vendoring, and offline mode
• run tests and examples for a C/C++ package
• publish and install C/C++ libraries from a package registry

When to choose

• you want a simple, explicit, package-oriented build workflow for C/C++ instead of a programmable build system
• you like Cargo's developer experience and want something similar for C/C++
• you need deterministic builds with lockfiles and vendoring
• you want one manifest to handle mixed C and C++ sources across GCC, Clang, and MSVC

When to avoid

• you need a fully programmable or highly customized build system like CMake or Bazel
• you require a stable 1.0 API - Cabin is pre-1.0 and features may change
• you need MinGW or clang toolchains on Windows, which are unsupported
• you have an existing large codebase with complex bespoke build logic

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

package-manager build-tool cli developer-tools programming-languages windows cli rust c cpp cargo-inspired ninja dependency-management manifest lockfile vendoring command-line linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="cabinpkg/cabin")