What’s your preferred setup for large C++ projects?

trying to put together something that won’t turn into a maintenance nightmare as we scale. sitting at aroubd 200k lines right now with a team of roughly 8 engineers, and were starting to hit some friction. not a disaster, but enough that id rather sort it out now than retrofit later.

current setup is cmake + make, gcc, no real dependency manager (vendoring almost everything),
ccache loosely configured,github actions for CI. it works.full builds are running around 25-30 minutes on a cold runner, which matches roughly what CI sees since we’re mostly doing clean builds on PRs. that’s the sore spot.

a few things i’m weighing: ninja over make at this sclae feels obvious but i want to hear it confirmed, vcpkg vs conan since we have mix of windows and linux devs, wether ccache is doing us any favors on CI or just on local machines. also debating clang vs gcc but no strong reason either way yet.

not looking for the perfect stack, just what people are actually running om codebases that grew past the point of simplicity. what broke first and what actually fixed it?

https://redd.it/1uckkfy
@r_cpp