I agree that this doesn't seem necessary. Personally I think Nix would be a good candidate for dependency management that works consistently between languages. I think that may be partway set up for Haskell, and I've noticed that nixpkgs has a good collection of Python dependencies. But for most cases the Nix flow currently usually involves using the language's bespoke dependency manifest to generate a Nix expression that downloads dependencies from the language's bespoke package repo.

One advantage of Nix is that you don't need all packages in one repo. Nixpkgs is mostly geared for the NixOS Linux distro. Each language ecosystem could have its own repo if that makes the most sense, with Nix being the common connective language.

The OS package manager is basically the C/C++ package manager. :P They all have OS level aspirations. Don't let them.

If you've ever tried using bazel, you might understand why writing a single package manager for multiple languages is a bad idea (at least, that's why I assume bazel is so god-awful)

CPAN for perl was the first one and it was very successful so got copied.

separate from the distribution or OS package manager.

Because it is way easier to manage them this way rather than have every distro package repo also support them. Additionally, windows and Mac are also targets and they don't have built in package managers.

C and C++ are the only exceptions

It is not as popular but https://conan.io/ exists. Personally, I miss working in c++ because the lack of a built in package manager made people manage dependencies more thoughtfully. It was not without tradeoffs but I preferred that world to adding a dependency being one command away.

i dont understand why you are confused. are you suggesting they should be in the OS? so each library has to be managed at least 6 times and then the ides and language tools have to support all these different stores? i bet ci/cd would just be awesome

or are you suggesting that all language maintainers work together in harmony and support one another?

C and C++ dont have package managers because they are older than the concept.

Because you don't want a single operating system manage the entirety of the Rust eco system. They need to be its own thing, so it can be used and managed by an individual team independent from any operating system.

Reminder that TIOBE is ass and shouldn't be used for basically anything except for who to target advertising to.

lowers barriers to adoption of the language and its ecosystem

Do any serious portable project with C and you'll see why. You'll either need to vendor in all the code you want to link against, or you'll constantly have compilation issues when the OS provided library differs (or doesn't exist at all) from the one you have on your dev box.

A language's packages need to be in lockstep with the language's version, and they usually depend on each other, too (to a much higher degree than they depend on programs/libraries from other languages, not counting stuff like C that many higher-level languages are built on).

Well, as a user of DSL (G'MIC), I'm happy without packages.