[jonny383]

This is C, not JavaScript. Does anyone really want an npm of the C world?

Header files work. They've worked for many decades. Yes, they require software authors to _do more work_, but they also help to eliminate a lib/ directory with 10,000 interdependent libraries that quickly becomes untrusted and frankly, ridiculous.

[bfrog]

The npm of the C world is the dozen different package management systems that people have crafted and spent countless hours on. They work, but the lack of a standard makes it a bit cumbersome. Building a .deb is like trying to run a american ninja course, lots and lots of esoteric obstacles. Sure you can hack a .deb, but there's about 2 dozen tools to actually make one that works like the real deal instead of your ad-hoc tarball.

[rat9988]

I'm not sure what you are criticizing really. npm is by far better than what we have in the C world, and why npm in particular? Because it's easy to bash?

[mschuster91]

Far better? Lol nope. In the C world the OS distributions and the general nastiness of shipping libraries outside of an OS distro at least turn away the newbies who think that the world needs yet another module that pads a string to X length.

The hardness of C is its weakness but also its strength. C programmers at least tend to know basic programming and OS management skills while JS programmers... oh hell I'm happy I got out of the mess that is "modern" frontend development.

[jiofih]

You still haven’t said a single word about package management.

[mschuster91]

oh I do have: the easier it is to publish code/packages, the more newbies and morons will flood your environment, to the point of unusability (or at least inability to do any sort of audit).

[jonny383]

npm as a package manager is good in theory. But in practice, it does tend to create a culture of "just use a package" for everything. For example foreach [0].

[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/foreach

[rat9988]

While I do easily agree that npm has created some sort of unwanted culture, I still think this culture was born partly because it's easy to publish/import. I can't say the same of the C world, moreover, there isn't only npm in the package management world.

[clarry]

> This is C, not JavaScript. Does anyone really want an npm of the C world?

I don't care for the deep dependency chains of npm, but integrating C libraries which use a mix of different build systems, and making sure your complete project cross-compiles cleanly with different toolchains for different arches is just irritating and time consuming. I don't think the situation is ideal.

[sedatk]

npm is an outlier. Package management ecosystems of Python, C#, Go and Rust don’t suffer from such cultural problems or dependency hells.

Arguably, you can attest some of those issues to JavaScript’s immense popularity but if even Python can manage it, others can too.