Lots of programming languages have their own package manager, separate from the distribution or OS package manager.
Going loosely from the TIOBE index:
- Python has Pip
- C# has NuGet
- Javascript has
npmfor Node.js - Visual Basic also uses NuGet
- R has a repository of packages that can be installed by running
install.packages("something")in R - Rust has Cargo/Crates
- Go has the
go getcommand - Swift has its own package manager
swift package - Ruby has RubyGems
- Java has Maven and Gradle (not sure if they are full package managers, or build automation tools with dependency resolution)
- PHP has Composer for managing libraries and dependencies
- C and C++ are the only exceptions I can think of, off the top of my head; libraries are managed by, and coupled to, the operating system


For C/C++ there’s conan, vcpkg, and whatever Redhat calls their scl system these days. I know there’s more, but those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head. You could argue that podman serves in this capacity to some degree.