CMake can also emit its own errors during the configure step though, particularly if you have complicated build logic and/or lots of external packages.

That’s mostly still true, with the small caveat that the default prefix on arm64 macOS is /opt/homebrew rather than /usr/local, so you might have to add it explicitly to your PATH

Projects for Apple platforms usually also use .h, where it could mean anything from C/C++ to Objective-C/C++.

In practice, Clang handles mixed C/C++/Obj-C codebases pretty well and determining the language for a header never really felt like an issue since the API would usually already imply it (declaring a C++ class and/or Obj-C class would require the corresponding language to consume it).

If a C++ header is intended to be consumed from C, adding the usual #ifdef __cplusplus extern "C" {... should alleviate the name mangling issues.

or Swift, Rust has semicolons while Swift doesn’t