[foldr]

The alternative (as with e.g. npm) is being tied to the hosting provider for the package ecosystem. If you want to, you can use your own domain name for your Go package URL and then link it to a repo hosted elsewhere. There's really no namespace on the internet that you have a more permanent claim on than a domain that you yourself have registered.

[KronisLV]

In the case of npm you could also use something like Sonatype Nexus, push your packages to your own npm repository and install them with --registry or something like that: https://stackoverflow.com/a/35624145

Further discussion: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40288843/installing-npm-...

It's just that most people don't do that, same as how most people will just store their code in GitHub.

[foldr]

You can host your own git repos too, if you want.

[KronisLV]

Yeah, I'm actually doing that with Gitea: https://about.gitea.com/

Some people went with the forgejo fork: https://forgejo.org/ though Gitea itself was a fork of Gogs, if I remember correctly: https://gogs.io/

I also ran GitLab in the past: https://about.gitlab.com/ but keeping it updated and giving it enough resources for it to be happy was troublesome.

There's also GitBucket: https://gitbucket.github.io/ and some other platforms, though those tend to be a little bit more niche.

Either way, there's lots of nice options out there, albeit I'd still have to admit that just using GitHub or cloud GitLab version would be easier for most folks. Convenience and all.

[_ph_]

Not at all. If you just reference to a package by its name, that is good enough for a compiler. I think automatic download of packages from third party sites doesn't belong into a language and its native tooling. The downloading and installing of third party packages could be done by a tool provided together with the language core tools, but should not be required to be able to compile a project at all.

[kbolino]

Strictly speaking, as with cargo/rustc, the Go module system and Go compiler are separate, and the latter can run without calling the former. There are various flags to tell the "go" command (which is a frontend to other tools) how to behave when modules are involved, e.g. so that it works well on airgapped networks and locked-down intranets or can be used safely with untrusted source. You can also still vendor modules to ensure they are locally available.