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by gkya
3587 days ago
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2,3: Or just use make and use OS package managers. Don't make the users learn yet another tool. The niche of C is Unix, which is here to stay. C is a part of Unix, it's interfaces are defined in terms of C, and plethora of libraries written in it. If a random library X is impemented in C, it is easily usable in many languages via FFIs. Programs written in C are easily portable to most popular platforms, and C knowledge is transferable from supercomputers to tiny embedded devices. C translates nicely to assembly, and it maps easily to mechanics of computing. These are the areas where languages like Zig need to penetrate. |
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OS package managers fulfill a different task than development package managers that are bundled with programming languages.
The OS package manager provides a consistent set of libraries that is required to run the applications that ship in the OS.
A development package manager is used to bundle all your dependencies and pin them to specific versions so the build is reliable and reproducible. This sometimes involves things like being able to have several versions of a library in your dependency graph. Or sticking to a specific older version of a library you need (because their release schedule might not align with yours).
A development package manager might also take care of the compiler/interpreter version(s) of your programming language, for languages that develop rapidly. Heck, I'd even want this for "slow moving" languages like C, where I sometimes end up requiring a recent-ish compiler version for some extensions/intrinsics I might be using.
Apart from some fundamental libraries (say, OpenSSL, Xlib, libc), you should not rely on your OS package manager if you wish to reliably and reproducibly be able to build your software. The rest you should probably link statically or bundle with your app binaries depending on how you distribute your software. If your software ends up being packaged for a distro, it's up to the package maintainers to ensure that it'll build and run with the other libs in the OS.
I do agree that it is a nuisance to have a package manager for every language, but so far no-one has stepped up to try to make a unified package manager that works with many languages.