Making other languages take affine times more seriously, I agree.

Package managers, which ones?

Perl was the very first, almost every language has their own, and even the growing C++ ones are able to use binary libraries on their package managers.

Among package manager + build tool devs I know, cargo is considered by most I know (maybe 2-3) to be best-of-class.

In terms of influences, here's an OCaml attempt to replicate cargo (I wish them well): https://github.com/OCamlPro/drom

Klabnik also mentioned Python's poetry below. Yarn as well, since Yehuda Katz was involved.

Note: I seem to recall you're an Ada dev, so I should mention that as far as build tools go, I've always really appreciated gprbuild, which is far superior to other build tools of its vintage. If it had a built-in package manager like cargo, it could compete with cargo.

So good that Google is not using it on Android, nor Fuchsia.

I like Ada, but no not an Ada dev, rather JVM/.NET/C++, I rather go polyglot.

And in this regard, while cargo is nice, I don't see how it is better than Maven (I don't suffer XML allergy), NuGET, vcpkg/conan, specially because it only does source packages with npm like levels of dependencies.

Yeah, I almost changed that "Ada dev" since as a polyglot dev, I figured you'd correct me. What I meant was that you had significant Ada experience (or I'm confusing you w/someone else).

Anyway, yeah, Maven is very good and competes with cargo, as well. I agree.

Nuget? Absolutely not, based on my previously undefined rubric. Unlike Maven and cargo, it's just a package manager unless it's recently been expanded (I'm not much of a Windows guy, so not sure). With some pretty crappy defaults as of a year or two ago. No idea about vcpkg or conan.

(I probably should have specified that I'm comparing among package manager that include build tools - or vice versa).

Edit: I suspect cargo will get around to binary packages at some point, as soon as that limitation is resolved in rustc using something like TUF. cargo has not been around nearly as long as Maven.

Btw, I'm also a polyglot dev. I've never used rust professionally (unlike say Ada), but I do really appreciate cargo.

And for the record, despite my love for functional programming, I also have a strong appreciation for Java (not as much as Ada, but it's a great language when used by competent devs).

Rust's package manager has many great features, but it went the other way around. Mozilla hired one of the authors of rubygems and yarn to re-implement their better ideas.

This is true, but so is the grandparent. Poetry, for example, cites Cargo as an inspiration. build2 describes itself as something "that aims to approximate Rust Cargo's convenience for developing and packaging C/C++ projects." I believe Go's "dep" was Cargo inspired as well, though that didn't work out.

Yarn came after cargo was started, I'm fairly sure.

> Package managers, which ones?

Python's Poetry comes to mind.