Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go’s package and dependency system is actually the only reason I have never started using it more. The lack of true versioning, unspoken assumption of GitHub, package system, and all of the confusion between god mod, go get, go install, etc. just hurts my brain. I think Rust actually has this perfect. It’s clear. You just specify the name and version and features in the Cargo.toml file and it is pulled from crates.io…
> The lack of true versioning, unspoken assumption of GitHub, package system, These aren’t true. There is true versioning and no assumption of GitHub. Shouldn’t this be a complaint about the assumption of crates.io? > No installation-time execution either. This is also not true. There is no installation-time execution.
No, I _like_ crates.io because Rust is very explicit that that is where the packages come from. We can get into the benefits and risks and whatever about centralized vs decentralized package managers, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I just want to know how Go does what it does so that I can code confidently in it. A lot of Go packages are specified like so:
go get -u github.com/username/repo/version
But this is not enforced (you don’t have to specify a version) and this is also not a valid Git repo path and where exactly is this dependency stored and I can go on and on. When you import this package it’s usually
import “github.com/user/repo/version/module”
But then there is not always a directory in the repo and… you get the idea. This sort of stuff hurts my head and I get it that Go is maybe trying to appear simple but this black box handwavey stuff can and will burn you (this very reason is why the Go community is generally against frameworks) so I just want to have a simple, clear answer and it seems no one else in the Go world has any of these questions. This turns me off.
I’m confused by your last bit. Neither Rust nor Go have installation time execution and this is good. I was referring to how you can’t just say “Oh Node has it and this is bad but Go doesn’t and this is good” because Rust doesn’t have it either.