Cargo is a pretty good tool, but it’ll happily fill up your disk with cached copies of crates that you downloaded somewhere in your user folder. Using a modern fs like BTRFS with extent deduplication helps to save space, but it doesn’t solve the problems.
pip and npm are practically equally bad, at least the maintained versions. If you’re using old versions that haven’t been supported for years (Python 2 etc.) then you’re in for a world of pain with both.
There are much worse alternatives. Anaconda, for example, takes half an hour to resolve dependencies while also autoloading itself into your shell, adding up to half a second (I timed this! I thought zsh was bugged!) of latency between shell prompts.
The worst tool is probably what many C(++) projects seem to do: use Git as a dependency manager by including entire git repos as submodules. I’m pretty annoyed at having to keep multiple versions of tokio around when building a Rust project, but at least I’m not downloading the entire commit history for boost every time I clone a project!
Cargo is a pretty good tool, but it’ll happily fill up your disk with cached copies of crates that you downloaded somewhere in your user folder. Using a modern fs like BTRFS with extent deduplication helps to save space, but it doesn’t solve the problems.
pip and npm are practically equally bad, at least the maintained versions. If you’re using old versions that haven’t been supported for years (Python 2 etc.) then you’re in for a world of pain with both.
There are much worse alternatives. Anaconda, for example, takes half an hour to resolve dependencies while also autoloading itself into your shell, adding up to half a second (I timed this! I thought zsh was bugged!) of latency between shell prompts.
The worst tool is probably what many C(++) projects seem to do: use Git as a dependency manager by including entire git repos as submodules. I’m pretty annoyed at having to keep multiple versions of tokio around when building a Rust project, but at least I’m not downloading the entire commit history for boost every time I clone a project!