Apt and/or ports follow you to every OS kernel I can think of (Linux, MacOS, Windows, *BSD, the Solarises), though the packaging doesn't always (for instance, the OpenBSD guys have a high bar, but that's a feature).
My theory is that each language community thinks it will save them time to have one package manager to rule them all instead of just packaging everything up for 4-5 different targets.
The bad thing about this is that it transfers the burden of dealing with yet another package manager to the (hopefully) 10's or 100's of thousands of developers that consume the libraries, so now we've wasted developer centuries reading docs and learning the new package manager.
Next, the whole platform agnostic thing falls apart the second someone tries to write a GUI or interface with low-level OS APIs (like async I/O), and the package manager ends up growing a bunch of OS-specific warts/bugs so you end up losing on both ends.
Finally, most package manager developers don't seem to realize they need to handle dependencies and anti-dependencies (which leads you to NP-Complete land fast), or that they're building mission-critical infrastructure that needs to have bullet proof security. This gets back to that "reinvent dpkg poorly" comment I made above.
In my own work I do my best to minimize dependencies. When that doesn't work out, I just pick a target LTS release of an OS, and either use that on bare metal or in a VM.
Also, I wait for languages to be baked enough to have reasonable OS-level package manager support. (I'm typing this on a devuan box, so maybe I'm an outlier.)
My theory is that each language community thinks it will save them time to have one package manager to rule them all instead of just packaging everything up for 4-5 different targets.
The bad thing about this is that it transfers the burden of dealing with yet another package manager to the (hopefully) 10's or 100's of thousands of developers that consume the libraries, so now we've wasted developer centuries reading docs and learning the new package manager.
Next, the whole platform agnostic thing falls apart the second someone tries to write a GUI or interface with low-level OS APIs (like async I/O), and the package manager ends up growing a bunch of OS-specific warts/bugs so you end up losing on both ends.
Finally, most package manager developers don't seem to realize they need to handle dependencies and anti-dependencies (which leads you to NP-Complete land fast), or that they're building mission-critical infrastructure that needs to have bullet proof security. This gets back to that "reinvent dpkg poorly" comment I made above.
In my own work I do my best to minimize dependencies. When that doesn't work out, I just pick a target LTS release of an OS, and either use that on bare metal or in a VM.
Also, I wait for languages to be baked enough to have reasonable OS-level package manager support. (I'm typing this on a devuan box, so maybe I'm an outlier.)