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by cstrahan 1196 days ago
FWIW, I find Cargo to be one of the biggest reasons I like Rust so much — maybe even more than anything to do with Rust itself or safe code.

I’ll often look for command line tools written in Rust, but not because of Rust fanboyism, but because I know I can just git clone the project and immediately start hacking on a new feature I need or a quick bug fix. In almost every other language I have to jump through one million hoops before I can build and run whatever it is, let alone have a nice developer experience (autocomplete, go to definition, etc).
1 comments
adgjlsfhk1 1196 days ago
Yeah, one of Julia's best decisions was taking heavy inspiration from Rust for the package manager. Rust was 100% the first language to get dependency management right.
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okeuro49 1196 days ago
> Rust was 100% the first language to get dependency management right.

In my experience, Java, Go, PHP, NodeJS have all got similar package management that works.

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justinsaccount 1196 days ago
See my above comment, there's a reason why all of your examples work:

Java package managers tend to install packages written in java

Go installs packages written in go, and maybe C using cgo

Cargo installs packages written in rust

php package managers install packages written in PHP, extra extensions are rare

etc

People having trouble with python are NOT having trouble with python. They are having trouble because they are trying to use packages that are just python bindings to absolutely massively complex c++ and Fortran libraries.

Often people using python don't even have a C compiler installed (let alone a fortran one for the scientific stuff), so pip blows up the first time they try to install a package that hasn't been pre-built for their system+python version.

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fiddlerwoaroof 1196 days ago
Yeah, npm was the first good package manager. It gets a lot of hate but my experience is that its strategy is the optimal solution for the problem it solves. And, I think a lot of things people complain about (lots of trivial packages, huge dependency trees, etc.) are an effect of solving the packaging problem well: if you make it easy to add dependencies, people will take advantage of that to add lots of dependencies.
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