nickelpro 3 days ago

Specifications for package interchange are absolutely essential, which is distinct from language endorsed package managers.

Python doesn't have a language package manager, you're free to use pip or poetry or uv or whatever, but it does have PEP 517/518, which allow all Python package managers to interact with a common package ecosystem which encompasses polyglot codebases.

C++ is only starting to address this problem with efforts like CPS. We have a plethora of packaging formats, Debian, pkg-config, conan, CMake configs, but they cannot speak fluently to one another so the package ecosystem is fractured, presenting an immense obstacle to any integration effort.

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howtofly 3 days ago

> Python doesn't have a language package manager, you're free to use pip or poetry or uv or whatever, but it does have PEP 517/518, which allow all Python package managers to interact with a common package ecosystem which encompasses polyglot codebases.

This is a long-standing pain point. LWN has a series of reports covering this, one of which is: https://lwn.net/Articles/920832/

physicsguy 2 days ago

Python polyglot code bases are not a solved problem at all. There have been difficulties installing TensorFlow and PyTorch with poetry for some time, and the installs still regularly break. This is the reason so many people use Conda. In HPC people are increasingly using Spack and EasyBuild to stop you having 10 versions of BLAS installed with all your Python dependencies.

Comparing it to other languages isn’t really fair since they don’t have polyglot code bases in the same way, and where native packages exist in for e.g. Npm, then you run into the same problems anyway.