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I wish there were a simplified (as in automated) and "community-blessed" workflow at least for static binaries with source dependencies, like all the popular "modern" PLs are doing these days. I'm saying this as a newcomer (in C++ land) that finds the lack of this kind of tooling a bit intimidating.

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I know what you mean. It's just really hard to bolt dependency management on C family languages, and so many ways it can exacerbate the problem by adding another layer of accidental complexity... (IMHO, CocoaPods is a good example of how a community-managed library dependency manager can end up creating a worse mess than the one it tried to solve.)

The Rust team started working on a package manager early as part of the language design, which seems like the only way to make it actually work.

Fun bit of history: it's a hard problem! Rust went through three different package managers in its history:

1. Cargo. But not the one you've heard of. A small Python script that pulled stuff off of GitHub.

2. Rustpkg. Felt like Go's tooling. https://doc.rust-lang.org/0.9/guide-rustpkg.html

3. Cargo, the one we still use today. https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2014-March/00908... just over three years ago.

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