It's not just that they are a mess accidentally, but they will necessarily become that. I won't discuss the full position here but in short: not everything needs to be automated, especially the automation of dependency hell. And making such things easier to do, is not a good thing and WILL lead to what mess we have no due to human nature.

Odin could trivially have a package manager and even one of the best support for it at the language level too because of how I designed what a package is in the language itself. I choose to not officially support a package manager because I don't want to encourage the path to hell.

They are a beautiful mess. crates is actually fantastic. Being anti package management is very unproductive. It's gross but it's super productive

Odin does have a pretty nice "package management" story. You can literally just throw a folder with Odin files into your project structure and it "just works". The compiler sees it and includes it automatically.

I don't hate cargo either, I've also used Ruby for years, gem is nice, but in both ecosystems there's also a ton of abandoned packages, some that haven't been touched in years...

> You can literally just throw a folder with Odin files into your project structure and it "just works". The compiler sees it and includes it automatically.

This is true of most modern languages. That's not the problem package management is solving. Package management is solving the problem of how you decide which versions of which files to put into your project, considering the fact that dependencies may form a complex graph, not a simple tree.

A language can decide that it simply won't support complicated dependency graphs, which is a valid decision but is the opposite of having a nice package management story.

Well, being able to simply chuck files into your project and not deal with actually importing, linking, etc... means that you can then just use something like git to manage files.

Anyhow, I've used Odin, it's easy, never found the lack of package manager to be annoying. I've also used Rust, cargo is nice. I think I maybe lean a tad to the way Odin works, if for no other reason than crates.io is a graveyard of dead projects and you constantly have to see what's active and what's not, I find myself going to each project's GitHub anyway. With Odin I just import librairies straight from GitHub.

And both are easier than C/C++'s lack of, well, anything.

When importing a library from Github, you also have to see if it's abandoned or not. Crates actually shows you the last updated date right there.