[rant]

I am completely exhausted trying to put libraries together...almost nothing works.

I had big problems with Allegro 4.9.8, which does not compile under VS2005 with libjpeg support (and other issues, I have posted them in the "installation, setup & configuration" area). I was fighting with this for almost 6 hours, and I gave up (nothing against Allegro, it was the required libs that gave me the trouble).

Then I saw that Nokia released Qt 4.5, which is open source. I downloaded their SDK, but unfortunately it plays only with Mingw. No problem, I said, I will use Mingw from now on.

I tried to compile the examples...they don't compile. Oh, the horror! the problem is the paths: since I have VS2005, the compiler does not look at the mingw STL library, but at the Microsoft's library. I searched the options in the Qt Creator, but there are none for the compiler paths. So, I gave up with this as well.

Then I went to another little thing I wanted to try: boost intrusive lists with smart pointers. Then I discovered that the specific type of lists does not work with boost's smart pointers!!!!!

At this point, I am extremely exhausted and thinking of quitting any programming for my own leisure.

I am also extremely frustrated by the state of C++ software. Nothing works out of the box, and I have to jump hoops in order to make things work...

[/rant]

C++ is by elitists, for elitists. It's what can be expected. No concept of usability.

What about QtCreator? have you tried that?

Yes, but I didn't like it :/ I tested it only with mingw, though. I preffer Visual Studio IDE + QtDesigner as a sepparate program. With QtCreator you end up with too many things that don't really fit on a single window (on my poor 1024x768 resolution ).

[edit]
Mmmm, I just found this

c++ is a convoluted mess because it has to find common criteria for everything from 8-bit micros to 64-bit super computers.

Libraries for both providers and users are hell. I was searching for an easy way of doing all this. Different languages compilers and build systems. But nearly all powerfull libraries are C/C++ and often don't provide a good platform-independent build support.
You could try a linux distro. They have nearly all the important libs as binaries and they are installed easily. No problems with dependencies. And mostly no need for compilation by hand.

Great, comparing a programming language with one that appeared 15 years later Interoperability back in the 70's wasn't such a big issue as it is today, saying C++ isn't focusing on it is just as true as saying old 1920 films don't scale correctly in todays' HDTV sets.

C++ is a mess because it is an old language. The same will happen to Java once it is overcame with newer, simpler and more powerful languages.

My point is that if you live in the past, don't complain when it doesn't work out for you.

Writing high-speed computational models is a thing of the past now? Just because you don't do real work with a programming language, doesn't mean the problem isn't there.

Some people have to work with C++, and answering their complaints with "oh, stop living in the past, duh" is not very helpful. Sometimes, as ReyBrujo said, you need to support legacy applications. Other times, something just can't be done efficiently in those languages: right tool for the right job etc, and the job that C++ does basically has no other tool that can do it aside from C++ (or C, I guess). And, as it has been noted, the tool is often clumsy to use, so yeah...

Emphasis mine.

That too, I personally never had the issues OP is talking about, perhaps because I haven't ever used MinGW and MSVC at the same time. If C++ works for you, it's the others' burden to prove that you should switch away from it. And if they don't feel like proving it, they might as well stop trolling about it.

Did you read the original post entirely?

Oh yes. Likewise, I would not have chosen FORTRAN as the language I do most of my stuff with these days...

IMO, C++ is such a giant mess because of its strict adherence to the "to everyone their own" rule (which basically states that the language should not contain anything that resembles user code), and because it refuses to add features that could somehow have an impact on run-time performance, however negligible.

It appears even messier because other, newer, languages have been made in the meantime, and some of them learned a lesson or two from C++.

Libraries are a mess because C++ (other than C) lends itself to multiple programming paradigms, and the same problem can be tackled using different programming techniques (e.g., use exceptions or return values? OOP or procedural? Templates or polymorphism?); but other than Java or C#, it doesn't come equipped with a monolithic library providing "95% of what you'll ever need" that you can rely on and that you can assume every other programmer uses as well. With C++, every library defines its own way of doing things, and often they don't go together well; with Java, for example, the compiler, the "library" (runtime), and the "machine" (the virtual one anyway) it runs on are standardized, and thus very predictable. With C++, there are a dozen compilers and a million different machines you can possibly face, and you need to accomodate them all somehow.

Actually, OOP is a lot more fun using a language that has built-in constructs for getters/setters, interfaces, events, a mother-of-all-classes ("class Object"), a built-in string type that goes all the way, and all those other nice things that make your life easier.