Take the rest of my message with a grain of salt. It's 6:30am and I'm working through my first cup of coffee still. I'm not intentionally trying to be a grumpy old man.

For the rest of us, I'm concerned that yet-another-package-manager (YAPM? Yap-meager?) will just continue to fracture the library ecosystem.

Why can't something like APT handle it? NPM doesn't work the same as PIP, doesn't work the same as Nuget, doesn't work the same as Gem, other than the most basic install functionality. Packaging libraries for distribution is different for each, and if you have a problem, tearing into the system to figure out where the failure occurred is different for each.

Maybe it's because, through hard-fought experience, I've finally learned how to manage .NET dependencies without too much headache. Don't ever even think of trying to use the GAC. Don't let your developers install the dependencies on their own. Just make a directory full of DLLs in your project root and use relative paths to load them. It's the only way I've been able to get developers up and running with a project in Visual Studio as soon as they clone the repository. Even Nuget gave me issues (though granted, I gave up on it so fast I don't remember what they were, other than telling the jr. dev to just dump the DLL in the libs directory already and get to work on the issue list).

Attempting to isolate your library ecosystem from the file system feels like it encourages "reinventing the wheel" at the language level for libraries that will mostly be the same across platforms. Do we really need to figure out how to do database connections in yet another language? Why are there 15 different syntaxes for positional arguments in strings?

I'm just getting a little... weary... of starting to learn a new programming and spending the next few hours just figuring out that they've renamed printf to writeln and %s to {0} for no good reason, or that there are no database connectors yet, or if there are they only implement a strange subset of databases. It almost feels like language devs have gone out of their way to be superficially different from everyone else, without being substantially different.

Given that most languages have support for some kind of foreign function interface, especially with the C ABI, it seems like we have the tools available to us to start building cross-platform libraries and distribute them regardless of consuming language.

I've been wanting to dabble in Rust for a little while, but damn, yet another package manager to learn, yet another notion of what a library ecosystem should look like, just doesn't excite me right now. It's time I will have to spend to get in the door, and I am not even sure right now if I will want to stick around.

But I suppose with an initiative like Rust, isolation is probably the correct ideology, considering it's about security/performance before productivity.

Anyway, complaining done. No hate for Rust-team's work. Just kind of yearning for a probably unobtainable utopian future :/