A critique of package managers

I don't see the value in making it even harder to build software. I want to make things. Downloading a dependency manually and then cursing at the compiler because "it's right there! why won't it load!!" is just gonna make me want to build software less.

Anyone I want to work with on a project is going to have to have the same frustration and want to work on the project less. Only even more because you see they downloaded version 2.7.3-2 but the version I use is 2.7.3-1.

> Downloading a dependency manually and then cursing at the compiler because "it's right there! why won't it load!!"

Odin's compiler knows what a package is and will compile it into your program automatically.

Isn't that a (built-in) package manager if it works for general packages? Or does it work only for selected dependencies?

It doesn't necessarily "manage" the packages. It just sees them in your project and compiles them. You manage them yourself.

If that's what happens, I think in the following claim:

> Odin's compiler knows what a package is and will compile it into your program automatically.

...the word "automatically" should be dropped. Of course compilers compile any supplied dependency "automatically", but it is so obvious that we don't often use the adverb just for that.

> Of course compilers compile any supplied dependency "automatically", but it is so obvious that we don't often use the adverb just for that.

They often don't though. Rust, C, C++ need either long command line invocations or a build system for anything beyond hello world. Zig needs a build file for anything beyond hello world.

With Odin, you just invoke "odin build ." and all your dependencies are taken in without needing a build system, build file, make file, etc...

This seems like a loss of separation of concerns. As a result Odin's compiler is full of completely unrelated stuff because it takes on this far larger role supervising everything about a project not just being a compiler.

Both Zig and Rust supply all of what you needed in the box, so all that Odin is doing here is commingling these features inside a single executable - there's no end user benefit that I can see.