Language package managers don't need copy-on-write, because there's no "write" — the files that make up dependencies are immutable from the perspective of the p

Language package managers don't need copy-on-write, because there's no "write" — the files that make up dependencies are immutable from the perspective of the projects that they get installed into. There's no advantage to using CoW to "deploy" such files into work trees, over using plain-old hard links to do so. (And hard-linking these files is indeed what all the Node package managers — other than NPM — already do.)