I suppose I could manually traverse my whole dependency tree myself and install all those packages myself. Set up cmake and pkg-config for all of them. If anyone else wants to try out my software, they’d have to manually look up all the dependencies in my github (?) and install those too. And hope the versions all line up nicely - which is a big if during development. Maybe I could script all of that dependency tracing - if only there were some standard software to do that. Guess not.

If C/C++ is all you know, you’re used to how painful all of that is. But what you’re proposing is a significantly worse experience in every way compared to what I can do with cargo or npm today. None of the claimed benefits seem remotely worth the cost of wading back into C dependency management hell. And cargo and npm show just how unnecessary all that pain is in C!

Just make good tooling. We can have nice things. I stopped using C not because I decided to write assembler. I stopped when better languages came along. You want me to stop using cargo? Nobody wants to go back to manual dependency management. Make something better.