Is it not curious that languages known for their rigor have solid package manager/build tools while the remakning languages do not?
This is not a technical problem. It’s a cultural one.
This is not a technical problem. It’s a cultural one.
Certainly Go is a more rigorous language than say JavaScript but it’s package mangement was abysmal for years. It’s not even all the great now.
C/C++ is the same deal. The way it handles anything resembling packages is quite dated (though I think Conan has attempted to solve at least some of this)
I think Cargo and others have the hindsight of their peers, rather than it being due to any rigorous attribution of the language
Frankly, PHP also has a very good packet manager with Composer. In general, PHP has done surprisingly good and sane decisions for the language and extremely solid support for static typing by now.
But yeah, Cargo definitely had the benefit of Hindsight.
The real problem is that system package managers need to be made easier to use and have better documentation, so that everyone stops trying to reinvent the wheel.
Apps don't support system package managers, system package managers package apps.
The problem is that this should be easy. Given a written description by the app developer of what files the app needs to be installed and what its dependencies are, writing a packaging metadata file for any given package manager should be less than ten minutes of work for the packager, and anybody should be able to learn how to do it in less than a day.
But the packaging systems are poorly documented and in some cases unnecessarily complicated, and then getting someone to add your app to any given package manager is more work than it should be and app developers start trying to figure out how to package it themselves instead of getting on with just developing their app.
> Getting away from that is the main feature that drive adoption of language specific managers.
> What is needed is a layer in between that work well with both languages and systems.
That's what system package managers are.