←back to thread

A critique of package managers

(www.gingerbill.org)
109 points gingerBill | 3 comments | 08 Sep 25 12:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.045s | source
Show context
NoboruWataya ◴[08 Sep 25 13:37 UTC] No.45168116[source]▶
I see this a lot with Rust where I will depend on one or two external crates for a simple application and then I am shocked to see dozens of dependencies being pulled in when I go to build. I actually think Cargo's support for feature gates and conditional compilation could in theory be a strong mitigation against this as crates can avoid pulling in dependencies unless you actually need a feature that relies on them, but in practice it doesn't seem to work that way as I often see these complaints about Rust.

I sympathise with the arguments but IMO laziness will always win out. If Rust didn't have Cargo to automate dependency hell, someone would create a third party script to fill the gap.

replies(3): >>45168261 #>>45168360 #>>45168912 #
account42 ◴[08 Sep 25 14:40 UTC] No.45168912[source]▶
> If Rust didn't have Cargo to automate dependency hell, someone would create a third party script to fill the gap.

Possibly but not guaranteed. Some other languages without a built in package manager haven't had an external one manage to take over the ecosystem, most (in)famously C and C++, while others have.

replies(3): >>45170401 #>>45175519 #>>45175524 #
1. alexvitkov ◴[08 Sep 25 16:35 UTC] No.45170401[source]▶
Most language users will follow the "spirit" of the language - e.g. Bill is against package managers, people who use his language mostly agree with his ideas, and there's not a huge standard Odin package manager.

I rather appreciate that C and C++ don't have a default package manager that took over - yes, integrating libraries is a bit more difficult, but we also have a lot of small, self-contained libraries that just "do the thing" without pulling in a library that does colored text for logging, which pulls in tokio, which pulls in mio, which pulls in wasi, which pulls in serde, which is insane.

replies(1): >>45174150 #
2. 1718627440 ◴[08 Sep 25 21:20 UTC] No.45174150[source]▶
C and C++ do have package managers. It's just that these languages evolved for OS implementation and also that these package managers are old and stable so they have support for a lot of languages, so that you probably know them as OS package managers.
replies(1): >>45175148 #
3. cozzyd ◴[08 Sep 25 22:50 UTC] No.45175148[source]▶
Which is the correct thing to do as things written in language X can depend on things written in language Y.