virtualenv was a community project but based on that venv was created and has been part of the official Python distribution since Python 3.3, released in 2012.
It doesn't stop there either I've seen python projects using nothing, virtualenv, venv, pip-tools, and pipenv.
I finally feel like pipenv is the true solution and it seems very new. All that said and Python is quite old relative to Go.
* a central package registry
* a file to describe dependencies
* a command line tool to install, build and publish packages
In Python things are more fragmented. You have:
* a central package registry
* a file to store some of your dependencies (Pipfile)
* a command line tool to install packages (Pipenv)
* a file called setup.py in which you need to specify your dependencies again (in another format). You can execute this file to build/publish packages.
It think it would allow for a much nicer user experience if pipenv/pipfile would handle packaging/building/publishing as well..
Of course, gradle hooks into the whole maven ecosystem but that is one of its advantages. Everybody in Java land understands Maven packages but how you generate doesn't matter.
If it wasn't for Android, I wouldn't bother 1 second to learn Gradle.
But I guess Groovy needs some project to keep it alive, now that no one remebers the days JSF beans would be written in Groovy or JUGs were holding Grails talks month after month.
Huh? Of those three, I would only consider Java "solved", and both Maven & Ant are far from the panacea of package management.
virtualenv is a community project (much like dep), is pretty new in the grand scheme of things, and isn't completely standardized (some projects use tox, some list out requirements.txt (rarely version pinned), and others vendor.
As for C++, almost everyone does something a bit different so I don't see how that is at all relatable.