cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/64685863
Lots of programming languages have their own package manager, separate from the distribution or OS package manager.
Going loosely from the TIOBE index:
- Python has Pip
- C# has NuGet
- Javascript has
npmfor Node.js- Visual Basic also uses NuGet
- R has a repository of packages that can be installed by running
install.packages("something")in R- Rust has Cargo/Crates
- Go has the
go getcommand- Swift has its own package manager
swift package- Ruby has RubyGems
- Java has Maven and Gradle (not sure if they are full package managers, or build automation tools with dependency resolution)
- PHP has Composer for managing libraries and dependencies
- C and C++ are the only exceptions I can think of, off the top of my head; libraries are managed by, and coupled to, the operating system
You want some way to define package versions in your repository, so that you can check out an earlier commit or a different branch and still have a working build. Because you do often need to adjust the code in your repo when dependencies get updated.
And going upwards from there, I think that languages are just a point where it’s quite natural for this to be solved, since the language creators care to build up an ecosystem and it does help when you can make language-specific assumptions.
I do think, it’s possible to create a package manager that spans across programming languages, like Nix is starting to be viable for.
But you need that to be ready when a new programming language is starting to take off. For all the languages you listed, that choice was made many years ago and you can’t easily reverse it.