A critique of package managers

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.

> 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.

The package manager for C/C++ is apt, or rpm, or whatever package manager your system uses. These package managers were designed for the world of C/C++ software so it's less surprising that these languages haven't found as much of a push towards language package managers.

It is not. Most distro have their own build scripts that target the specific library name that is needed. Dependencies is mostly done through a mix of convention, helper programs/scripts and compiler args.