1. A good python solution needs to support native extensions. Few other languages solve this well, especially across unix + windows.
2. Python itself does not have package manager included.
I am not sure solving 2 alone is enough, because it will be hard to fix 1 then. And ofc 2 would needs to have solution for older python versions.
My guess is that we're stuck in a local maximum for a while, with uv looking like a decent contender.
PHP and composer do. You can specify native extensions in the composer.json file, along with an optional version requirement, and install them using composer just fine. Dependencies can in turn depend on specific extensions, or just recommend them without mandating an installation.
This works across UNIX and Windows, as far as I’m aware.
Is that a new feature? Pretty sure it didn't a few years ago. If the thing I need needed the libfoo C library then I first had to install libfoo on my computer using apt/brew/etc. If a new version of the PHP extension comes out that uses libfoo 2.0, then it was up to me to update libfoo first. There was no way for composer to install and manage libfoo.
> Php-yaml can be installed using PHP's PECL package manager. This extension requires the LibYAML C library version 0.1.0 or higher to be installed.
$ sudo apt-get install libyaml-dev
This is basically how "pip" works, and while it's fine for basic stuff, it gets pretty bad if you want to install fancy numerical of cryptography package on a LTS linux system that's at the end of the support period.
I am guessing that PHP might simply have less need for native packages, being more web-oriented.
My guess is that we're stuck in a local maximum for a while, with uv looking like a decent contender.