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by mypalmike 1432 days ago
Upgrading dependencies is fraught in all languages.
2 comments

It's really not. I've had a much, much worse experience with Python than Elixir / Go / Node for various reasons: lots of different tools rather than one blessed solution, people pinning specific versions in requirements (2.1.2) rather than ranges (~> 2.1), dependency resolution never finishing, pip-tools being broken 4 times by new pip releases throughout a project (I kept track)...

In Elixir I can do `mix hex.outdated` in any project, no matter who wrote it, and it'll tell me very quickly what's safe to update and link to a diff of all the code changes. It's night and day.

Thankfully, it's getting gradually better with poetry, but it's still quite clunky compared to what you get elsewhere. I noticed lately for instance that the silent flag is broken, and there's apparently no way to prevent it from spamming 10k lines of progress bars in the CI logs. There's an issue on Github, lost in a sea of 916 other open issues...

Haven't had any issues in Go so far.
As soon as you take 2 dependencies in any language, there's a chance you will not be able to upgrade both of them to latest versions because somewhere in the two dependency subgraphs there is a conflict. There's no magic to avoid this, though tooling can help find potentially working versions (at least by declaration). It's often the case that you don't encounter conflicts in Python or other languages, but I don't imagine that Go is immune.
Are you familiar with npm? I haven’t used it deeply in years, but the last time I checked it still supported conflicting dependencies.

If A and B both depend on different versions of C, then both versions of C are installed and A/B see the version they want.

I've used npm but an not familiar with these kinds of details of it. There would seem to be some potential putfalls, such as two libraries accessing a single system resource (a config file, a system socket, etc.). I will take a look into this though. Thanks.
npm works around some problems like this with a concept of "peer dependencies" which are dependencies that can only be depended on once. The typical dependency, though, is scoped to the package that requires it.
Rust can include different versions of the same library (crate) in a single project just fine. As long as those are private dependencies, no conflicts would happen. A conflict would happen only if two libraries pass around values of a shared type, but each wanted a different version of the crate that defines the type.

I can't see a reason why Go would be different.