4 ms·

My pet theory is that package managers will one day be seen like we see object-oriented programming today. As something that was once popular but that we've sin

by c7b 5mo ago

My pet theory is that package managers will one day be seen like we see object-oriented programming today. As something that was once popular but that we've since grown out of. It's also a design flaw that I see in cargo/Rust. Having to import 3rd party packages with who-knows-what dependencies to do pretty much anything, from using async to parsing JSON, it's supply chain vulnerability baked into the language philosophy. npm is no better, but I'm mentioning Rust specifically because it's an otherwise security-conscious language.

weregiraffe 5mo ago
But you can't expect the language std to supply you with every package under the sun.
- c7b 5mo ago
  I don't have an answer what the alternative is going to look like. But smarter people than me may find something. C/C++ are doing fine without package managers. Go at least has a more capable standard library than Rust. But I'm not sure if Go's import github approach is the answer. One idea I've been entertaining is to not allow transitive imports in packages. It would probably lead to far fewer and more capable packages, and a bigger standard library. Much harder to imagine a left-pad incident in such an ecosystem.
  - well_ackshually 5mo ago
    >C/C++ are doing fine without package managers. They're not either, every one of these projects contains a gigantic vendor/ folder full of unmaintained libraries, modified so much that keeping up with the latest changes is impossible so they're stuck with whatever version they copied back in 2009.
    - jkercher 5mo ago
      You make that sound worse than it is. On the overall topic, you have 0 supply chain risk, and the whole thing is local. Also, your code from 2009 is still valid. That would be a foreign concept in some languages like Python.
      - baq 5mo ago
        you have your supply chain risk still, it's just frozen as of 2009 and whatever you vendored back then is as of today swiss cheese; also you'd better have the compiler suite vendored, too (as you should with this strategy). there's nothing stopping you from using python from 2009 except why would you want to do that to yourself - but the same strategy applies. the reference python implementation is written in C, after all.
  - pjmlp 5mo ago
    In C and C++'s case, the batteries included is POSIX + Khronos.
    - kibwen 5mo ago
      In this analogy, the battery is the Leiden jar cobbled together by Benjamin Franklin in 1750. It's 2026, POSIX is unfit for purpose.
  - uecker 5mo ago
    The solution exists, and those are curated package repositories as we have in Linux distributions. In C I can simply install a -dev package and use some library which sees some quality control and security updates from the distribution. The problem is that the UNIX shell model got very successful and is now also used on other platforms with poor package management, so all the language-level packaging system were created instead. But those did not learn from the lessons of Linux distributions. Cargo is particularly bad.
    - marcus_holmes 5mo ago
      TFA is literally talking about vulnerabilities in Linux packages. There are gajillions of them. Curated package repositories are not solving this problem.
      - MSFT_Edging 5mo ago
        I think curated package repositories solve a problem, but not all of them. For example, I'm not sure if the world of windows freeware ever moved past this, but very often, the home page for a freeware package will look nearly identical to a page set up to deliver malware. Every package you download you wonder "is this the legit version?". Even push it further, there were multiple examples of sites that were previously trusted for software downloads(SourceForge and the installer debacle) that began packaging spyware or adware into downloads. With either delivery method, you're not quite safe from supply chain attacks, but with the curated repo, you at least have a single source of packages where you can trust it 99% of the time.
      - uecker 5mo ago
        It talks about "installing software". You should definitely install updates from your Linux distribution and installing new packages from a curated repository is certainly not worse than having software already installed. Reducing the footprint is always a good idea though. Installing software from random uncurated sources is generally risky.
    - kibwen 5mo ago
      > But those did not learn from the lessons of Linux distributions. Cargo is particularly bad. I recall a decade ago listening to native app developers lamenting how web pages were inferior to native apps and gnashing their teeth at why browsers wouldn't learn the lessons of native apps. It was, and remains, a shocking display of self-unawareness to fail to understand why web pages, despite doing many things worse than native apps, managed to do blow native apps out of the water when it comes to doing the things that actually matter to users. This is how it feels listening to the above comment; you have failed to reflect on why both programming language authors and programming language users were pushed to using language-specific package managers in the first place, and you have failed to put forth any improvements to OS-level package managers that would allow them to address those underlying flaws.
  - rounce 5mo ago
    > Go at least has a more capable standard library than Rust. Many Golang projects I see in the wild will import a number of dependencies with significant feature overlap with sections of the standard library, or even be intended as a replacement for them. So it seems that having an expansive stdlib isn’t sufficient to avoid deep dependency trees, it probably helps to some degree but it’s definitely not a panacea.
    - Measter 5mo ago
      That's not really that surprising when you think about it. Standard library-provided things are implemented on a basis of working OK for as many scenarios as possible, not on one of being the best possible implementation for every possible scenario.
  - kibwen 5mo ago
    > C/C++ are doing fine without package managers. More or less the entire Debian apparatus is an organization devoted to being a C/C++ package manager, and while as an end-user it's adequate for installing applications it's still an enormous pain to use packages as libraries even with apt and friends. And once you get outside of apt, you're in an endless hellscape. People don't seem to understand that the real reason that people love Rust is not because of memory safety (let's be honest, most people are too short-sighted to care about that); it's because of Cargo.
    - skydhash 5mo ago
      > it's still an enormous pain to use packages as libraries even with apt and friends. And once you get outside of apt, you're in an endless hellscape I strongly doubt that. Especially with tools like pkg-config that let you generate the set of flags for a package. If anything I've seen more horrendous build scripts from people that are trying to be clever and trying to support everything under the sun.
  - CJefferson 5mo ago
    I think what we really need is better sandboxes languages. I’d be much happier if my compression algorithm only had an input stream and an output stream. Maybe my gui library shouldn’t have network access or filesystem access. It just draws what I give it, gives me back what users press. You could still make evil software in this world of course.
    - c7b 5mo ago
      Sounds like functional programming could help with that?
- foresto 5mo ago
  A stdlib doesn't have to provide everything under the sun in order to be helpful here. Languages with rich standard libraries provide enough common components that it's feasible to build things using only a small handful of external dependencies. Each of those can be carefully chosen, monitored, and potentially even audited, by an individual or small team. That doesn't make the resulting software exploit-proof, of course, but it seems to me much less risky than an ecosystem where most programs pull in hundreds of dependencies, all of which receive far less scrutiny than a language's standard library.
pjmlp 5mo ago
Rust is quite bad on this, having to rely on external crates for error handling or macros is even worse than what async runtime to pick up. Yes, I mean crates like anyerror and syn.
- kibwen 5mo ago
  I'm all for including more things in the Rust standard library, but anyhow and syn are literally from a core Rust dev. It's not some left-pad rando, it's like a Linux user saying they don't trust the Git developer.
mike_hearn 5mo ago
The industry hasn't grown out of OOP. Go look at any major production codebase businesses rely on and it's fully of objects and classes, including new codebases made very recently. Package managers aren't going anywhere. Even languages that historically bet on large standard libraries have been giving up on that over time (e.g. Java's stdlib comes with XML support but not JSON). Unfortunately, LLMs are also not cheap enough to just create whole new PL ecosystems from scratch. So we have to focus on the lowest hanging fruits here. That means making sandboxing and containers far more available and easy for developers. Nobody should run "npm install" outside a sandbox.
- c7b 5mo ago
  It's a condensed statement. There was a time when I would start a new programming project thinking about class hierarchies, maybe drawing some UML diagrams. I don't do that anymore, and I don't believe it's very common for greenfield projects anymore. But educate me if that's wrong. We've kept some of the good ideas from OOP like namespaces and interfaces and we use them in slightly different contexts now, where OOP may even still be technically possible, but it's not the primary way of doing things anymore. I believe, or at least hope, that we will see a similar kind of evolution for package managers. Where it's still possible to use other people's code, but having packages like left-pad or is-even is no longer how it's commonly being used, even if it may still technically be possible.
  - mike_hearn 5mo ago
    I think that's normal, what universities teach as OOP is very different to what's actually done in the real world. But it was always that way. I learned OOP as a kid and UML didn't feature. Then at university it was taught in a very theoretical way. On the other hand things like encapsulation, inheritance etc are still widely used.

by c7b 5mo ago

weregiraffe 5mo ago

But you can't expect the language std to supply you with every package under the sun.

c7b 5mo ago
I don't have an answer what the alternative is going to look like. But smarter people than me may find something. C/C++ are doing fine without package managers. Go at least has a more capable standard library than Rust. But I'm not sure if Go's import github approach is the answer. One idea I've been entertaining is to not allow transitive imports in packages. It would probably lead to far fewer and more capable packages, and a bigger standard library. Much harder to imagine a left-pad incident in such an ecosystem.
- well_ackshually 5mo ago
  >C/C++ are doing fine without package managers. They're not either, every one of these projects contains a gigantic vendor/ folder full of unmaintained libraries, modified so much that keeping up with the latest changes is impossible so they're stuck with whatever version they copied back in 2009.
  - jkercher 5mo ago
    You make that sound worse than it is. On the overall topic, you have 0 supply chain risk, and the whole thing is local. Also, your code from 2009 is still valid. That would be a foreign concept in some languages like Python.
    - baq 5mo ago
      you have your supply chain risk still, it's just frozen as of 2009 and whatever you vendored back then is as of today swiss cheese; also you'd better have the compiler suite vendored, too (as you should with this strategy). there's nothing stopping you from using python from 2009 except why would you want to do that to yourself - but the same strategy applies. the reference python implementation is written in C, after all.
- pjmlp 5mo ago
  In C and C++'s case, the batteries included is POSIX + Khronos.
  - kibwen 5mo ago
    In this analogy, the battery is the Leiden jar cobbled together by Benjamin Franklin in 1750. It's 2026, POSIX is unfit for purpose.
- uecker 5mo ago
  The solution exists, and those are curated package repositories as we have in Linux distributions. In C I can simply install a -dev package and use some library which sees some quality control and security updates from the distribution. The problem is that the UNIX shell model got very successful and is now also used on other platforms with poor package management, so all the language-level packaging system were created instead. But those did not learn from the lessons of Linux distributions. Cargo is particularly bad.
  - marcus_holmes 5mo ago
    TFA is literally talking about vulnerabilities in Linux packages. There are gajillions of them. Curated package repositories are not solving this problem.
    - MSFT_Edging 5mo ago
      I think curated package repositories solve a problem, but not all of them. For example, I'm not sure if the world of windows freeware ever moved past this, but very often, the home page for a freeware package will look nearly identical to a page set up to deliver malware. Every package you download you wonder "is this the legit version?". Even push it further, there were multiple examples of sites that were previously trusted for software downloads(SourceForge and the installer debacle) that began packaging spyware or adware into downloads. With either delivery method, you're not quite safe from supply chain attacks, but with the curated repo, you at least have a single source of packages where you can trust it 99% of the time.
    - uecker 5mo ago
      It talks about "installing software". You should definitely install updates from your Linux distribution and installing new packages from a curated repository is certainly not worse than having software already installed. Reducing the footprint is always a good idea though. Installing software from random uncurated sources is generally risky.
  - kibwen 5mo ago
    > But those did not learn from the lessons of Linux distributions. Cargo is particularly bad. I recall a decade ago listening to native app developers lamenting how web pages were inferior to native apps and gnashing their teeth at why browsers wouldn't learn the lessons of native apps. It was, and remains, a shocking display of self-unawareness to fail to understand why web pages, despite doing many things worse than native apps, managed to do blow native apps out of the water when it comes to doing the things that actually matter to users. This is how it feels listening to the above comment; you have failed to reflect on why both programming language authors and programming language users were pushed to using language-specific package managers in the first place, and you have failed to put forth any improvements to OS-level package managers that would allow them to address those underlying flaws.
- rounce 5mo ago
  > Go at least has a more capable standard library than Rust. Many Golang projects I see in the wild will import a number of dependencies with significant feature overlap with sections of the standard library, or even be intended as a replacement for them. So it seems that having an expansive stdlib isn’t sufficient to avoid deep dependency trees, it probably helps to some degree but it’s definitely not a panacea.
  - Measter 5mo ago
    That's not really that surprising when you think about it. Standard library-provided things are implemented on a basis of working OK for as many scenarios as possible, not on one of being the best possible implementation for every possible scenario.
- kibwen 5mo ago
  > C/C++ are doing fine without package managers. More or less the entire Debian apparatus is an organization devoted to being a C/C++ package manager, and while as an end-user it's adequate for installing applications it's still an enormous pain to use packages as libraries even with apt and friends. And once you get outside of apt, you're in an endless hellscape. People don't seem to understand that the real reason that people love Rust is not because of memory safety (let's be honest, most people are too short-sighted to care about that); it's because of Cargo.
  - skydhash 5mo ago
    > it's still an enormous pain to use packages as libraries even with apt and friends. And once you get outside of apt, you're in an endless hellscape I strongly doubt that. Especially with tools like pkg-config that let you generate the set of flags for a package. If anything I've seen more horrendous build scripts from people that are trying to be clever and trying to support everything under the sun.
- CJefferson 5mo ago
  I think what we really need is better sandboxes languages. I’d be much happier if my compression algorithm only had an input stream and an output stream. Maybe my gui library shouldn’t have network access or filesystem access. It just draws what I give it, gives me back what users press. You could still make evil software in this world of course.
  - c7b 5mo ago
    Sounds like functional programming could help with that?
foresto 5mo ago
A stdlib doesn't have to provide everything under the sun in order to be helpful here. Languages with rich standard libraries provide enough common components that it's feasible to build things using only a small handful of external dependencies. Each of those can be carefully chosen, monitored, and potentially even audited, by an individual or small team. That doesn't make the resulting software exploit-proof, of course, but it seems to me much less risky than an ecosystem where most programs pull in hundreds of dependencies, all of which receive far less scrutiny than a language's standard library.

pjmlp 5mo ago

Rust is quite bad on this, having to rely on external crates for error handling or macros is even worse than what async runtime to pick up. Yes, I mean crates like anyerror and syn.

kibwen 5mo ago
I'm all for including more things in the Rust standard library, but anyhow and syn are literally from a core Rust dev. It's not some left-pad rando, it's like a Linux user saying they don't trust the Git developer.

mike_hearn 5mo ago

The industry hasn't grown out of OOP. Go look at any major production codebase businesses rely on and it's fully of objects and classes, including new codebases made very recently. Package managers aren't going anywhere. Even languages that historically bet on large standard libraries have been giving up on that over time (e.g. Java's stdlib comes with XML support but not JSON). Unfortunately, LLMs are also not cheap enough to just create whole new PL ecosystems from scratch. So we have to focus on the lowest hanging fruits here. That means making sandboxing and containers far more available and easy for developers. Nobody should run "npm install" outside a sandbox.

c7b 5mo ago
It's a condensed statement. There was a time when I would start a new programming project thinking about class hierarchies, maybe drawing some UML diagrams. I don't do that anymore, and I don't believe it's very common for greenfield projects anymore. But educate me if that's wrong. We've kept some of the good ideas from OOP like namespaces and interfaces and we use them in slightly different contexts now, where OOP may even still be technically possible, but it's not the primary way of doing things anymore. I believe, or at least hope, that we will see a similar kind of evolution for package managers. Where it's still possible to use other people's code, but having packages like left-pad or is-even is no longer how it's commonly being used, even if it may still technically be possible.
- mike_hearn 5mo ago
  I think that's normal, what universities teach as OOP is very different to what's actually done in the real world. But it was always that way. I learned OOP as a kid and UML didn't feature. Then at university it was taught in a very theoretical way. On the other hand things like encapsulation, inheritance etc are still widely used.