[jauntywundrkind]

I admit I'm not super well versed in what conda's main uses are. Python's whole tooling situation has felt like a nightmare & I've tried to keep far away, but I've had to face it a lot more recently because it's so prevalent for AI. Thankfully uv seems to have done a huge amount of what I need.

Still, if the concern is language-agnostic ways to use tooling, mise (nee rtx) is the 1000 pound gorilla in the room today. Incredibly fast well built Rust based tool that has really massively expanded in scope & offerings, with grace & elegance. I thought it was an asdf replacement, for installing/using toolchains, for .tool-versions files. But it's really grown to be a lot more, capable of letting you isolatedly manage tools it can install from a huge variety of backends (pip, npm, cargo, others). https://mise.jdx.dev/dev-tools/backends/

[matrss]

Hadn't heard about that before, looks interesting. But AFAICS mise focuses on installing tools, not actually all dependencies. It integrates with the languages dependency management tools, which doesn't help you if the language doesn't even have one or the integration wasn't written yet.

I'd rather see more adoption of guix for this purpose. It is a single package manager with a functional approach that allows for introspection of all dependencies (down to the bootstrap toolchains used to build the bootstrap toolchains that build your toolchains, which is something that AFAIK no other package manager except for nix can do), has a fairly large package repository, straightforward locking, actually tested packages, and very easy build recipes (unlike conda-forge...).