>Yes, Go Modules was still guided by Googlers, who were even more in control of the language direction back then than they are now. Yes, change always causes some drama. But, I'm not really here to explain the history of Go package management...

>I'm just saying that C++ could have a nice, distributed package management system, it would just require the major stakeholders to all care and work together on it. The ISO C++ language committee is a finite number of people. They are the major stakeholders, as far as the language direction is concerned.

The ISO C++ committee can't learn from the history of Go modules community acceptance because they don't have the same power as Google. You seem to misunderstand what the C++ committee _is_. Yes, they have representatives from Microsoft/Google/Apple/Intel but the org is designed to review proposals from submitted papers. They are more like an ongoing academic conference rather than a devops team that runs websites.

We seem to be discussing 2 different abstractions of making a "package manager". With your emphasis on Modules, you seem to be only focusing on the tool. To repeat my gp comment, I'm also focusing on the canonical package repository (or index, or discovery engine).

Consider the following sentence from https://proxy.golang.org:

>The Go team is providing the following services run by Google: a module mirror for accelerating Go module downloads, an index for discovering new modules, and a global go.sum database for authenticating module content. >As of Go 1.13, the go command by default downloads and authenticates modules using the Go module mirror and Go checksum database.

You misunderstood my cite of "pkg.go.dev" run by Google Inc but this is the part of your survey that I was referring to:

>The package discovery site pkg.go.dev is new to the list this year and was a top resource for 32% of respondents. Respondents who use pkg.go.dev are more likely to agree they are able to quickly find Go packages / libraries they need: 91% for pkg.go.dev users vs. 82% for everyone else.

The ISO C++ committee is not set up to implement a new website to make the above Go-specific paragraphs be a similar reality for C++ with a search & replace "s/Go/C++/g". Think about _who_ funds and provides paid people to actually run the "proxy.golang.org". It's Google Inc. The C++ committee doesn't have an equivalent situation.

Yes, the C++ committee can receive a proposal for new language syntax such as "std::unique" and after some back & forth commentary and debate, they say "approved" and then it's up to each C++ compiler vendor to then go and independently implement it on their own timeline. In contrast, if someone proposes "C++ should have a package manager", exactly _who_ will implement and maintain the canonical repo mirror? This is not independent lines of work that GCC, Clang, Microsoft, and Intel can do on their own. Even if we hypothetically extend the website "isocpp.org" to actually start hosting the canonical C++ repos instead of just blog posts about syntax proposals, _who_ is paying for it? Again, there is no single entity like Joyent/Mozilla/GoogleInc that raises their hand and says, "We'll set it up". I suppose we could imagine that the major players like MS+Google+Apple all contribute to a shared fund to pay for the repo mirror -- and the salaries for devops to remove malicious uploads -- but notice no other major language package manager Javascript/Rust/Go had to do it that way. So we have that friction of coordinating multiple corporations. Even if that website was set up, many existing C++ library writers (that existed for decades before a C++ package manager) wouldn't bother uploading their code to it. So that's another friction. E.g. Conan is supposedly the current winner of C++ package manager mindshare and ffmpeg is not on it.

I think the disagreement is rooted in how we compare ISO C++ committee vs Google Inc. To me, releasing a C++20 language specification* does not say anything about implementing a canonical repo* so that a command line tool magically works the way people expect.

EDIT to reply: >You can have a package manager without having a discovery tool or a central repo.

This means your conversation is focusing on the tool which isn't the abstraction I'm emphasizing.

>Package discovery tools are not very relevant to the discussion.

It's relevant if the particular person wondering "why C++ doesn't have a package manager?!?" uses a mental of model of how npm and cargo work. They don't have to know if it's github vs gitlab vs somewhere else. The tool just works without thinking about the location. That's what a canonical repo as a default convention for the client tool provides.