[jchw]

What's unique about Go is the lack of a centralized package repo. You are saying "I could point NPM to another registry". I am saying, Go doesn't have a registry and you can't really point it to one. I hope it is apparent that these are two extremely different statements. The fact that it is pinning source to source is just the approach that they take to get there.

And again, if you just bolted a solution onto the side of an existing ecosystem it wouldn't accomplish as much. "Technically this could be done elsewhere" is true, but I hope you know I know that. The point is that Go deployed a mostly decentralized package management solution to the entire ecosystem as the primary and essentially only way to manage packages with Go. You actually could approximate what Go does using NPM, sans the caching module proxy part, using VCS URLs as dependencies, but the "approximate" and "sans caching module proxy part" is doing some heavy lifting.

There isn't really anything that does what Go does exactly. The closest example to me is OCI images. Like Go modules, their identity is essentially a sort of URI. However, it isn't a language package manager and has fairly different challenges, and doesn't really seem to need the caching proxy stuff due to the relatively few registries (and running it would be very expensive due to image sizes.) So I stand by with my belief that what Go does here is pretty unique.