[bsrkf]

Excuse me for not having much to add to the discussion but two interesting references for people to check out, if so inclined of course:

a) Ginger Bill (the Odin language creator, no affiliation) stated on a podcast that Odin will never have an official pkg manager, since what they're, in his opinion, mainly automating is dependency hell, and this being one of the main reasons for rising software complexity and lower software quality; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYUruq352yE&t=11m26s (timestamped to the correct position) (they mention Rust explicitly as an example)

b) another programmer rather seriously worried about software quality/complexity is Jonathan Blow, who's talk "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization" is worth watching in my opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko (it's not talking about package managers specifically, but is on topic regarding software complexity/quality as a whole)

Addendum: And sorry, I feel like almost everyone knows this xkcd by now, but since no one so far seems to have posted it; "obligatory xkcd reference": https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/dependency_2x.png

[_bent]

> a) Ginger Bill (the Odin language creator, no affiliation) stated on a podcast that Odin will never have an official pkg manager

The cognitive dissonance for how one can believe that Rust preventing you from derefercing freed memory at compile time is overzealous nannying by the language authors -- while at the same time deliberately making code reuse harder for users because they could make engineering decisions he doesn't like is staggering.

[mustache_kimono]

> a)... Odin will never have an official pkg manager

Perhaps this explains why Odin has found such widespread usage and popularity. /s

> b)... Jonathan Blow, who's talk "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization"

With such a grandiose title, before I first watched I thought it must be satire. Turns out, it is food for the credulous. I believe Jonathan Blow is less "seriously worried about software quality/complexity" than he is about marketing himself as the "last great hope". At least Blow's software has found success within its domain. However, I fear Blow's problem is the problem of all intellectuals: “An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others.” Blow has plenty of opinions about software outside his domain, but IMHO very little curiosity about why his domain may be different than your own.

My own opinion is there is little evidence to show this is a software quality problem, and any assertion that is the case needs to compare the Rust model against the putatively "better" alternatives. Complex software, which requires many people to create, sometimes across great distances of time and space, will necessarily have and require dependencies.

Can someone show me a material quality difference between ffmpeg, VLC, and Samba dependencies and any sufficiently complex Rust program (even which perhaps has many more dependencies)?

     ~ ldd `which ffmpeg` | wc -l
     231

Now, large software dependency graphs may very well be a security problem, but it is a problem widely shared with all other software.

[bsrkf]

  "Perhaps this explains why Odin has found such widespread usage and popularity. /s"

What an unnecessarily snark and dismissive comment to make about someone's work.

  - I'd say within a certain niche Odin is becoming well known and gets its use
  - you do realize using an `Odin package` is putting a program into a sub-folder and that's it
  - It comes with a rich stdlib + vendor libraries out of the box
  - and isn't it kind of up to the creators how to design and promote their language

I'd even argue it's laudable a language doesn't promote itself as a "fixes everything use me at all costs" kind of technology. The creator himself tells people it might not be the right tool for them/their use case, encourages them to try other languages too, sometimes outright tells them Odin doesn't fit their needs and xyz would probably do better.

Odin is pragmatic & opinionated in its language design and goal. Maybe the lack of a package manager is the basis for you to disregard a programming language, for plenty of others (and likely more Odin's target group) it's the least of their concerns when choosing a language.

[mustache_kimono]

> What an unnecessarily snark and dismissive comment to make about someone's work.

The snark was intended, however any dismissiveness concerning Ginger Bill's effort was not. However, when you make a decision like "Odin will never have a package manager", you may be choosing to condemn your project to niche status, in this day and age. Now, niche status is fine, but it definitionally comes with a limited audience. Like "this game will only ever be a text based roguelike."